Shattered Souls
by Draenog Glas
Summary: A sequel to The Beast in the Corner. The story written by hundreds of the personalities inside Sonic's head, Sonic tries to escape the recent events by staying in his mother's elaborate beach house after her death, with Amy and Miles. He soon hears voices and other forms of himself, telling him The Beast will return to protect his Core, including the return of Shadow. Sonamy.
1. 1 (Regular)

**A/N: Yes, this is a sequel and kind of an explanation to several things in a fanfic I wrote many years ago when I struggled with writing, The Beast in the Corner.**

**There is a trigger warning for sexual abuse, mostly incest, and other disturbing and abusive situations, since I go much further in depth with what Sonic had dealt with in the story.**

**This is somewhat based on When Rabbit Howls by the Troops for Trudy Chase. I was going to make a variation of the title on the book but I figured if this story is completed and really well done I may publish it someday, as someone had suggested to me once that The Beast in the Corner could be rewritten and published.**

The sea breeze tasted as salty as ever on his tongue. He had remembered it, so long ago, when his mama and papa had took him to this very beach, in this house built of stilt glass, the sand warming his feet, his eyes, his heart, and he sees the sun over the shore, a bladed goddess that bleeds into the sky, the pink raw meat tenderizing the feast for the seagulls. The car he drove was old, a "POS" as his son had called it, and he breathed out the ocean shore all in his lungs, the tales of mermaids and mermans, the tales of watery caves and the mystical creatures that lied underneath the estuary. It felt like home to him. A home that he never felt in years.

The days spent in the psychiatric ward had tired him. His hands were weary of no cigarettes, no beer, and he never got much sunshine in a ward like that. The windows were barred while all the pink rats had pissed in their sheets, waiting for their deathtakers to come and give them a kiss into another world they barely knew. He had a world inside of him, a world that lied dormant inside of him, sleeping, a glowing ruby, a baby infant jewel, nestling inside the confines of his head.

"We were supposed to get married! Is this supposed to be our pre-honeymoon?"

The hedgehog wearing a thick overcoat even in dry summer days couldn't answer. Sipping on margaritas while back at his parent's old home they gave to him, all his all his! His mother died, the old bitched witch, and his father, the haggard bastard, they have all set and rot in their graves, and the beach house was his. He hardly knew them. His memories were clean as a Windexed window. The glass carried no trace of his mom and pop's memories.

Pop! The clap of his mighty hands as they arrived! The house had come to them, and Amy, half-dozed in her slumber, had seen how immaculate the whole house was, and Miles, little Miles, was he so excited to come and play! The beach careened its shores to the ocean, the waves licking up all the sand like a lemon popsicle, while the sky was violescent, full of wonder and hope! He had enough of the wards, the medications, the trials and tribulations of the birth and death of his inmates at the sanitarium that was colored with white steel with green and yellow pipes. The lights never lit up the rooms properly; they were as blind as moles, as blind as gods! The hedgehog had thought they were full of nicotine, the yellow burnt walls, the ashy walls, the silver walls, the hospital was a strange colored hospital, but it was old-fashioned, rustic in its design, been keeping people insane since the 1920's. The jazz age has enticed him, the dancing of their tapping shoes and the Gatsbyian characters, throe with murder and splendor, the hospital had none of that, and it continued to stink of medicine and white wine, the same liquor his father had drank, the haggard bastard, the lowlife cretin.

_Give me another, will you…_

_Give me more…_

_Aren't you going to give me more?_

_I wanted more you son of a bitch! Give me more!_

More of what?

The father's wine had collected like plasma in a hospital, ready to be dispensed to the needy, to his father's gullet, to the white man's liver, full of splendor and decay.

_I told you…to give me more…_

His father was a big, rustic man, as big as the ward, and he had pipes collected in his pancreas, he walked with a cane, and he often couldn't feed himself. Sonic had to take care of everything. His mother was too busy shopping. Too busy getting her nails done. Too busy ignoring her son. Her husband. The big man, obese, the imprints sucking him in his Laz-E-Boy chair. Sonic had told him that he had enough. That he couldn't have any more white wine, else his sugar would skyrocket. And out comes the big needle of insulin, inject some of that Novolin in him, have him eat a cake because he needs some sugar, then have the Novolin again…

Sonic couldn't take care of a diabetic. He hardly knew anything about them. He even looked in his school books about it, and information was scarce. Diabetes wasn't such a new disease, was it? It's been around for a long time. Maybe even since that hospital has been built. He pondered if his father was handsome back in the 1960's, another age full of self-proclaimed innocence. Rolling in his eyes seemingly deeper into the pitholes of his skull, he suckered in more breath into his lungs, the oxygen tank that allowed him to breathe like a fish inside of ice. His father was a sick man, both physically, and emotionally.

"I need more…goddamn it! Sonic, get me more of my baby sweet white wine now! Mama isn't going to appreciate you treating me this way!"

Mama Stormie was always gone. Mama Stormie never gave a damn.

And his father mostly had a mentality of a child. The accident, long ago, that he caused, Sonic, the one who caused his brain to scatter and rust…

"Give me more now!"

He stored the white wine in the cabinet, the key in lock twisting its organs to keep it shut. A lock had to be installed, otherwise his father would come in and drink every wine and every beer that he had. And Sonic needed some of that beer. He needed it to stay alive in this godawful, piss-smelling world.

"I'm gonna…I'm gonna…"

Lying in the darkness of the corner of the closet, he watched his old man's hands rise, so shit-covered, so smelling of bitter chocolate wine and stained with his thousand bloodsheds from a thousand years ago. Lying awake, in fear of the once strong man's glory, his gloved hands once containing the mercy of so many gods, the teeth he shattered out of drunk men in alleys, the rats he pulled free of rat kings, and had ate upon their plaguish flesh.

The man, with breath of so much whey and alcohol, of high fructose corn syrup, his marriage ring proving nothing anymore, except how hard he could beat his child with, had risen, and he had clamored, with his voice as loud as lions in mountains, as men who were falling and plunging from the mountain god's hands.

"I'm warning you goddamn it…"

He closed his eyes. Wished it was over already.

His eyes were full of black ink. He couldn't remember any more.

"Sonic, look out!"

His hands, wet with sweat, swerved out of the way to avoid a semi-truck, and without Amy's proclamation, they would've been considered as dead as his mom and pop.

The sweat trickled from his brow, from his hands that reached for the holes in the steering wheel. Demanded a cigarette, even if his breath was becoming slighter, running away from him.

"Sonic, I don't know what's gotten into you! First you forget your wallet, and you sit there staring off into space, and then you forget Miles' name and start speaking in…what I think is Welsh? Or something like that? Then we almost got killed! I…hope that hospital hasn't made you…really loony, more than what you used to be."

He couldn't think of it.

Got that loonyness from his mother. The mother he never wished to call by Mommy or Momma ever again. His throat hacked, coughed, thinking of how he was loony enough already, as the million voices had told him in unison.

The beach was so far away, but he could collect the sea shells already, feel the tides swim underneath him…

"Sonic, are you OK?"

It was a trick question. A trick statement. OK was only a variable. The lines were 60 degrees counter clockwise. The numbers are as high as the tides of the ocean.

The infant jewel had lied inside of him, sleeping, unperturbed by the others…

The memories of his father, the ocean, the black ocean that dared to suck him up, it continued to sway under the summer breeze…

When he woke up, his teeth were broken. A clichéd dream of having his teeth fall out. But it was real. And his tongue had reached the gap of his tooth. It was there.

The young boy, the young boy who was so young, so blue, as blue as the ocean in the starless, riverring sky, his eye was red. His father had broken a blood vessel. He had wanted to call 911, but his father had told him he would finish him off if he told anyone about what happened.

Sonic's eye watered, and he went back in his room, his only escape from this filthy society. The rats had come and chewed through the walls. The broken windows and plastered teeth the home had were as broken as his tooth. His mother claimed they were going to fix the home, and sell it to some rich, wealthy family. Other than his father's temper tantrums, it was a nice home, until the rats came in, and feasted upon their leftover food and garbage, their tails always connected together, their shit and squeaking always so loud and so deathly.

Opened a beer, and he began again on his writing that was hidden under his desk. He wrote more things that he knew would never be published. Never was a good writer, his words so scrawled, as inanimate as his voice in the house of No Dreams. He always couldn't get past a paragraph without wanting to give up. His life had carried too much filth, too much pity from people who really didn't know what it was like taking care of a brain damaged diabetic alcoholic and obese father, a father whose fate was so unbelievable that even he himself could never believe it, and a neglectful mother, a relationship with her that carried on the borders of incest, but yet he couldn't say anything to stop it.

She loved him too much.

The woman that had carried veils of fisherman nets with dead shrimp lying in her curls of hair, had pictures of him in her wallet, but not her husband.

Her husband was the one who needed help, who needed someone to take care of his sugar intake, his rages, his breathing that soon tumbled him into unconscious little flit moments at a time, and how he couldn't tell what was right, to beat his child and ask for the white wine in the cupboard, or to wait until his sugar dropped that Selwyn could drink little increments at a time. Didn't know. Diabetes was a complicated disease, and his doctor had told him repeatedly that if he kept drinking white wine like he does now, he will die in as little as a few weeks. But yet he was still here. Selwyn, the big man who had dialysis hooked up to him, had to take shots of insulin every time he ate, and was brain damaged to the intelligence of a 6 year old child, was God's little joke.

As he wrote more single paragraphs, all of them unconnecting, all of them burnable and nothing but food for the flame creatures, his mother had arrived, her woolen hands full of bags, her face of ivory teeth like a fine-tuned piano, her eyes that were seaglass, she had dropped the presents for herself on the couch her dear husband wasn't taking, and she called her son, her son she loved.

"Sonic? Sonic, come here, mommy's got a little present for you."

He was 15, yet she still used terms such as "mommy", "baby doll", and often referred to his dead sister, Sarah, who died when she was in the womb with him. They were twins, and one had died as soon as they were born. His mother was very neurotic, just as disabled as her husband, and he knew that he had to take care of her too. She couldn't make dinner herself without wishing she could put razorblades and needles in her husband's food. She always tried to make Sonic the most gourmet food her hands could chisel from her greasy mitts, and her husband, she hated the rat king, the rat bastard, and had tried to douse his food in cigarette ashes, tinfoil, sewing needles and fabricated hearts, and cyanide.

Sick, sick as the rest of them! Her ailment needed more than the psychiatric medication they prescribed to Sonic back in the hospital.

If only he could cut off those disgusting titties and sap all the milk from them. Put them in a flowerpot, make them grow. Make them grow out to be bulbous plants that desired to be kissed by him, with thin red lips as red as sweet cinnamon and ginger.

The mother he could never escape, her arms so wide, so intoxicating with sin and shame. As much as he took care of her, he hated her too, yet couldn't leave her abandoned. He was fired from too many jobs. He wasn't sure if he could work any other job but a crone at a publishing company. One that rarely, if ever, published a good book. Most of them were trash. Sappy literature that often seeped of vampires and werewolves and romance found in Lifetime movies and Hallmark specials. He could puke from thinking of the turgid filth that collected on the pages like black, letter-shaped flies, stuck there and dying as the reader pulled them out, trying to get something out of them. Couldn't complain, as the company paid him more than his father ever got out of social security, just to keep quiet that the company was ripping off the authors and raking in profits themselves with scams. They never cared if the book they published had any merit at all.

The woman with the jewels on her hands like bedazzled eyes collected from slave children, she pointed towards him, and told him to come. Her breasts flopped around, the wretched tits, and his heart sank, his eyes had collected the well of tears from so many childhoods he had to please his mother, since the age of two. God help him, God have mercy on his soul, the little god that shined on his bowl of milk and cereal each day, the udders of the cows that were sacrileged to feed him, and his mother, and his disgusting, horribly disabled and disfigured father. The God had opened up and swallowed him whole by this point, the God of the household, the transvestite mother who was rich, but always collected dropped rings in her purse and showed them off to her family. Stole bread and wine and the milk she collected in her sagging tits. The seaglass eyes looked like jewels she stole from someone too, the sea green emeralds that spoke out to him as he carried the shopping bags, full of luxuries and heretic prizes, and she consumed him, in her pit of fire, the flames that have risen and burned all his sanctity away, the black turgid flames of Hell that Satan had kept for his guiltiest of prisoners.

He blacked out again before she could show him her gift. The blackouts always meant something bad. The forgetfulness always meant something bad. Everything he could think of in his memories were disgusting and as dark as the house had been, the house that was later bulldozed and wrecked, to settle in a nice Victorian house. A Victorian house he knew he couldn't have. He thought he deserved it, after all the shit he's been put through.

He collected all his tears of the incident, and stamped them to the address of the company who designed the house. They told him to suck a moose, whatever that meant. Maybe they were Canadian. And he tore the paper up into even, triangled shapes, and blew them across the sky. They had stabbed God's womb, and he expected it to bleed of milk, but it had not.

The beach house lied like the very prizes his mother had collected. The sea licked it evenly in her chops, and he thought how nice of a getaway it would all be. The white sheets they wore in the hospital would be replaced with fine suits and dappled gowns and silk pajamas made from the very silkworms of China and the same jewels his mother had worn. He told Amy to not wear the fine emeralds he got her a long time ago. They stayed in the jewelry box, with their precious eyes peeping at her, wanting tribulation for the crimes his mother had committed.

The Others had called. His head ached, his eyes glazed and gazing at the empty tureen of the sink that spout out clean, purified water for his slake thirst to swim in, and he wasn't sure of who they were. He carried the suitcases upstairs as he could hear whispering in the wind, the claws reaching out for him, the monster licking his jowls as he imagined how tasty his meat would be, fine cut, like the sky as the sun, the saw that seeped of blood, had made it burn on the grill. He tried to forget about it and looked at the fancy restaurants that were next to the beach house, that he would be able to afford due to his mother's will. She was dead, who gave a shit what he did with the money! Her meat was cold, her heart was cold, and her hair had turned as black as the night, her trees inside her chest no longer moving and swaying and rustling, her tree in her tit that no longer grew and blossomed out to her dead child, to her child who was as cold, lifeless, pale gray.

Couldn't think that way, as the woman was a bitch, but he could never be a hollowed out disgusting worm as herself. She and his father had wriggled for so long in the dirt; he wasn't sure when they would die. And not once had his father ever said "I love you". And not once had his mother said "I'm sorry".

The ashes were on top of the mantel piece in the beach house. She desired to be cremated. Sonic never as much as looked at the urn, or his father's, but he wanted to take them away to the darkness, the dark corner of his home that he knew for so long, that his parents often told him that he was nothing but the beast in the corner, who had forced the sick and weak woman to listen to her desires that were as wrong as the black pit in the earth underneath them were worms and devils lived, and his father claimed he couldn't stand looking at Sonic, much less gaze into the same eyes he inherited from his mother. Seaglass, with the touch of the bubbly foam that rose from the sea, and he drenched his feet in them, the feet that had walked so long in Hell's plaza.

It was both a gift and a curse to be here, he thought. The voices were unfolded in the palm of his hand, so many, like little stars, little saplings…

"Sonic, are you coming to eat with us?"

His son, the blue eyes that effaced with worry, bleeding with pity, had walked towards them, and Sonic watched the seagulls fight over a piece of food that he could remember that his father used to eat all the time. German chocolate cake, with the melting frosting staining the sand as if it stabbed it with its sharp shame.

The light broke through the window of the home, the many shards collecting on his fragmented faces. They had waited. And They had come, Their knives ready to slice him apart like a pickled meal.

—

They went to a macaroni bar, one that was special. Unique. The food was mediocre. And they ordered him to pay 125 for his meal. He had a glass of chardonnay with his alfredo that tasted faintly of the soup that he drank in the fetid summer as his mother had watched him, with glaring hatred, no longer his Mommy that had fed him until he was a large round pig, his face full of the milky dew that dripped from her tits.

He remembered, as he gazed far off into this memory…he was about eight years old. His father was a rational man at the time, working, supporting his family, but still a drunk. Selwyn still drank white wine while wearing his lascivious suit, looking to arouse his wife. But he never did. She always hungered for the beast in the corner, the child who always whispered, the child that just wanted to be loved, but was hated.

His mother had a little bit of sense back then. She often felt sorry for Sonic in ways that made her apologies even worse than the punishments. The soup, the piss colored soup, it had a spoon immersed in it, and he remembered he was full, and he didn't want to eat anymore. Their meal of German chocolate cake and ham roast and turkey and cold soup had fed him, but he didn't want any more of her bounty. The child felt he would puke all of the bounty, vomit all the roses and incarnations she had given him. The beast, the child, she wanted him, she wanted desperately for him to love her, but he never could. Her eyes always told him there was more to her lies, her fingers doused with arsenic from the cigarettes she smoked, her piano teeth, he couldn't stand the bitch, and as her yellow tobacco-stained nails had grabbed hold of his quills, she dragged him as he screamed, told her to stop.

"Stop! Stop Mommy! What are you going to do? What are you going to do with me? Stop Mommy, please…"

His nose bubbled with snot, his eyes quivering with tears. His mother hacked out, struck the child hedgehog in the face, and said, "Listen to me you little shit! You're never going to call me Mommy again! I'm queen of this goddamn castle, so from now on; you're calling me 'Madam'. Or 'Goddess'. Why won't you love me you little shit? I am all your world has ever wanted. We are both nothing without each other. What the hell did you just say to me?"

His mother very rarely flew into rages. She only physically abused him when he said the truth. That he hated her.

"I said that I hated you." He choked through his sobs, but the words barely bubbled to the surface.

The latrine was filled with cold water, water that smelled of the sewers. They haven't had their pipes fixed in so long, that the water looked like waste, orange and smelling of a foul odor. The child hadn't taken a shower in a month, and was thus scorned by the other children in his school.

She sidled in the air above him an old-fashioned razor, from the golden age of jazz, and she smiled, her piano teeth playing a sorrowful, dark tune.

"Say that to me again and I'll cut your throat."

She pressed the blade to his thin neck. One good cut in his arteries and he would say goodbye to Mommy, goodbye to Daddy, and hello the God that would feed him milk and wine, as if he was always a very hungry babe who feasted on the finest things in life, including the ham roast his mother made, and the cold placenta colored soup that lied across from the bathroom, broken, smashed, as the jewel inside his body began to be birthed by the Ego.

"No Mommy, don't do this, please…"

"Then never say those things about me again! You only got me, and only me, got that? You're my life baby doll. You're the only thing I got in this miserable mess. Sarah would be too, but oh Sarah had an unfortunate time getting out of me…she's still around, isn't she Sonic? Just in a better place?"

She asked him this question many times. He always answered the same.

"Yes Mommy. She's here. She's in your room, right now, on your bed, wanting you."

She moved the razor away from his neck, and snapped it back in its case. The water stifled his nostrils. He wondered why she even poured water into this latrine from the mercurial faucet, but her hand was firmly gripped to the back of his head, the grip growing tighter, the sobs becoming more uncontrollable from the woman he deemed a bitch, but truly his Mommy.

Mommy meaning a goddess who always damned him, plunged him into Hell, and he could never get away. Well into his teens, right until he was about 17, did he ever made an elaborate plan to run from his mother and father, away from the moon that cut the sky like the Mother's razor, the sun that had glowered over him, like his father's jaundice skin back in '83, when he drank far too much wine and his liver began to go through dialysis, the first of the many curses he dealt with in taking care of a man who never cared for him.

The latrine contained the ginger water, the mother raising his head high, a baptist's first moment in cattle prodding the name of God into him. Except he didn't believe in God. He never believed in God. He was dead right when he was born. He was the Anti-Christ that gave birth to the tyrants of his mother and father, one a loony who came from a psychiatric hospital who decided to have two babies, three, four babes. And one who was well-to-do, but always drank to deal with the mother's fussing over her children that had died stillborn, the jars as sea green as her eyes.

The latrine stared back at him with shit-colored eyes, and his mother's nails scratched the ends of his head, clawing, ripping, searing, as his head was plunged into the water, the silver rim becoming corrugated as the water had touched it with its venomous body.

It had rushed into his nostrils, the water that was like shit, and his mother plunged him down further, until he couldn't see the latrine's shiny face anymore, his vision obscured by darkness, a chiaroscuro of black.

His head was full of sinews and holes. He lay across the bed from Amy, but yet as her breasts pointed upward towards the ceiling, her body vulnerable to his touch, he had no desire. One of The Others said she was like Mom, and sex was a horrible sin to commit, even if it was with someone he trusted, gave his world to.

The darkness had swallowed him whole in the bedroom. Sonic listened to the infant jewel inside him, cooing to be protected, guarded, away from the sticky milk and the sticky hands and the sticky bloody mouths.

He turned over, away from her face. He realized he had so many faces for her to see. He wasn't sure of how many, but they all wanted out.

Sonic listened to the waves fighting over the shore, drunken fools dancing on the edge of the sky, and it reminded him of his father, back when he didn't have such a large fracture in his head.

The Others spoke, a web of telephone lines in that shitty apartment they lived in. Children, wives, husbands, teenagers, even animals, they all spoke aloud to him, as he swore he could read the blood that dripped from the walls, like a finely beaded cut from a rusted razor from the 1920's.

"**THE BEAST IS BACK THE BEAST IS BACK THE BEAST IS BACK THE BEAST IS BACK THE BEAST IS BACK THE BEAST IS BACK".**

Was he a monk that could wish for his heart to stop beating? Was he a hedgehog who once, too, was brave, like his father? Was he alive? Was he leaking poison out of his fingers like Mommy Dearest? Were his lips full of red dye and iodine? Was he pretty, smart, and everything in between? Was he a boil, a rotted wart, destined to be cured as said in the newspapers and magazines? Red and cadaverous he was, so full of white flesh, blue quills that no longer shined, hands that shed of whittled to the bone nails and so slimy his lips were full of fleshy snails. He couldn't cry anymore, the tears ran out, they were all lunged towards the ocean, where the drunken men shout, shout, shout, until the sun sleeps down, down_,_ _down_, **down**, _**down…**_

"Shut up!"

A vase broke. It had shattered against the wall, and ashes had come flying out, its blood, its life that it once contained.

"Sonic…"

He couldn't hear their voices. They were all belted out to the dark, the din dark, the hullabaloo dark, the vociferous dark, the shouting that can cut through his legs and make him never run again.

Words were the sharpest blades. They were the hara kiri in the night.

"Sonic, what's wrong?"

He beat against his skull, he wanted them gone.

"What do you mean The Others have come back? You told me…you told me The Beast was gone just now."

The Beast was him. The Beast in the Corner that sat and watched his mother stroke the dead carcasses of her children.

Her eyes, they reminded him of the pickle jars that safely housed her little sleeping babies, all curled up like pearls in a clam shell.

"Sonic…"

Amy tenderly held his muzzle, looking at those pickled eyes, the babies calling from their milk-deprived throats.

"There's more to you than that, is there?"

He nodded his head.

"The Beast isn't gone, Amy. He's still alive. He just went away for a while. I don't know when he'll come back, but…there's more than the Beast. There's like a thousand others in there. They're alive, they all want out…"

Sleeping quietly, those little babies were, their skin mummified and gray…

"That's…right, isn't it? I mean, the drawings I saw when you escaped from the hospital. The tweezers, the pictures of the walls, the monster that…there's much more, is there?"

"I never wanted to have it happen right now. Especially when I just got out of the hospital. I don't want to go back there Amy. It was dark, it smelled, and…and someone died, someone I felt…is still around…"

"Sonic, you're being ridiculous." She wanted to slap him. Slap the crazy out of him. But he gripped his head, the voices brimming further, higher from the flames of Hell, and she couldn't think of anything to cure him. He was as sick as a dog with heart worms. He needed to be put in a cage for a long time, as the worms ate his arteries and veins.

The child had rose from his slumber, his pink rosy hands reaching out towards her, the child that wanted to be cradled, without abuse, without malice, without sexual greed.

"Are you my mommy?" he asked.

Smaller he was, his eyes black and peerless, but innocuous, and she held him, unsure of what to do with her husband at her bosom, wanting to smell her strawberry hair and be pricked by warm kisses, but she had treated him like the child he was deep inside, the fingers barely nubs, the eyes blind as stars, seeming to have a starfished nose like those moles she never saw. Starkissed, he laid aside from her chest, as she told him bedtime story after bedtime story after bedtime story to get him to sleep. But he still wanted Mommy to stop hurting him.

"I can't make all the pain of your Mommy go away," she said. "But I don't know what to do with you, I don't know what you're going to do with Miles, I don't know what you're doing to Sonic! Why are all of you doing this?"

Sonic had sat alone in that corner, his eyes pale, as pale as his skin, and he watched the new doting mother wishing her husband had never given birth.

He wished he was never pregnant with the mother's abuse, the father's drinking, the father's angry fists, and the wretched milk, oh how he hated the taste of it.

"Stay here Sonic. I'll see what we need to do with this child of ours."

He swore it wasn't his, but he stared blankly at the sandy wall, seeing the seashells beginning to drift off in the tide, the lighthouse signaling the men to come back from their fishing, and seagulls eating dead polluted fishes off the shore. The fishes still had their eyes open. They were only blind if he plucked them from their sockets.

Sonic wanted them to stop staring, so he did. And a hole, a pit where insanity lied, the vacuous gaze only looked back at him, and he imagined he could see the million worms tumbling out of its flesh, fishy flesh fishy flesh rotting in the sun, mouth so open, mouth so wide, gills so dry.

He cried, he cried! And the baby had heard him, and started to cry too.


	2. 2 (Vignette)

There was a house that sat in the middle of Broadway street. Smelled. Rotting wood, worms prickling through it. Rats infested the countours, ate small little bits of leftover food and dead animals. Sometimes other rats. Sun was hot, melted the sweat off his head. If I took the sun, I could divide it to 57 parts. One part was the yellow color. Another was the red color. Another was the rays. So many rays. So many.

There's some sort of equation here we can get about Sonic's house. The door's paint was chipping. White cum melting off the walls. Mother prepared for her big break in television. Drying nails. Drying piss-colored nails. He was reading a book. Reading. Trying to ignore her. As I Lay Dying. Jewel is a fucking prick.

Blood stained the wood that sat in wait, waiting to die.

He counted how many ravens lined the phone lines. 1, 2, 3…

Father drinking. White wine. Always white wine.

His fat belly protruded from his sweaty shirt. He had flabby hands, his ears lined with babyshit orange earwax on the lobes.

Going to the movies, The WITCH BITCH said. Her nails were yellow. Color of piss.

Die, he said. In his head.

Eyes teared up at the corners. He wiped them. He wiped them up. Now they stung. They hurt. He could barely prick his eyes open like the worms.

His father had one more cup of white wine before he slurred his speech, a susurration that he was going to kill him. The Host. The Host of the Others. God help us.

His fist bled through. I can dissect his knuckles in 8 parts. One would be his forefinger. Sharp. One would be his marriage ring. Sharp, extra damage. His mouth bled, his mouth bled like a woman having a period, slow, filling up the walls.

Three would be the thumb, hoisted back. Then the middle finger. That's four.

He was bleeding, unconscious.

I can divide Sonic's heart into 125 parts…

Those 125 parts are all of us.

God bless him. He passed out on the floor, bleeding like a dying animal.

His father passes out too. He went into a coma.


	3. 3 (Vignette)

It was a yummy cookie. But I didn't want it. Even if my tummy rumbled inside me.

She told me I could have it, and a toy. What toy I asked? Anything you want. What's that word that my adults tell me she was? Seductive? She wore pantyhose and I can see her golden earrings dangle in the light, like little Christmas tree ornaments. She was decorated like a Christmas tree. A black Christmas tree.

I chew on that cookie, slowly, almost when a cow chews cud and spits it back up for some reason cause it has four tummies. The cookie didn't seem like it was worth it. Deserved. I threw it back up. It was my cud.

She was disgusting. Very yucky. But I did what she told me. I couldn't say no, despite the adults telling me about strangers. But I knew his mommy. I knew her. I couldn't say no or she'll take the sharp thing and cut me in half.

She smelled yucky. I could taste sweat on her bed. Foul odor was in my nose. She kept telling me to eat it. No. No. No. NO. NO. NO. NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

IT HURT IT HURT

I WANT TO HURT MYSELF SO THAT HURT CAN GO AWAY

She makes me eat a bar of soap. Ivory Dove, and it tasted faintly of bubbles. Bubbles were nice. Not always. When I ate bubbles it meant I did something that hurt. This hurt very bad.

I see the sharp thing on the bathroom sink. Tears are coming out of his eyes. He's hurt too. We're hurt too.

He feels yucky inside, like I do. I feel like my organs are bad. Bad parts. Especially my pee pee. It was stiff and I felt very bad and he kept crying and I kept holding the sharp thing and I wanted it to all go away go away go away make the mommy go away I didn't want to see her anymore I hid in the bathroom in the piles of her clothes and can catch her yucky stench of her pee pee in the underwear and I felt yucky again and I threw up and I took the sharp thing that will cut me in two and I cut his arm and more of us were born.

The Core didn't like that, but there was nothing more I could do.

The yuckiness didn't wash off when I took a shower. I felt yucky forever.


	4. 4 (Regular)

He had a beer. It was cool in his hand, seeped of amber ale, and he chugged it into his gullet, as if he had been thirsty for a long time. He watches the waves curl up at the shore, touching his toes, while Tails made a sand castle. Something like that. We think he was having a good time, despite the baby.

We can't tell you about this baby. It lied in its nursery that Amy found in one room (possibly when he was born, when he was a shell before he grew into us) and cooed, wanting some warm milk and lunging towards the breasts Amy had. She wasn't sure where the infant came from. Sonic couldn't have given birth to it. He was a man. Men never gave birth. Inside him, there were women. There were men who had a uterus. Children who can split us apart like stars. God was inside all of us. And God had multiple personalities. DID. Dissociative Identity Disorder.

He denied it. He said what happened back at the hospital was something straight out of a nightmare. He gripped the beer tightly in his gloved hand. He took another swig of it. The Beast never existed, he said. It all was a lie. Misconstrued. He made it up just to get attention.

"That isn't true," she said.

The baby lied in its hangar, sleeping so peacefully, so sound…

We tried to let Sonic know. He felt yucky. He felt yucky for a long time. His organs were dead. His heart stopped beating, spreading love to his body. He drank that alcohol stuff and he told that lady about the story of what happened to him in the hospital. We all knew what it was. We knew it. The Beast was real. He was real. And he felt yucky too.

In his words:

"I remember that hospital. It was piss-colored. It was colored with white and green and yellow pipes on the building. It was dark. And I couldn't have a beer in the place or even cigarettes cause they apparently weren't therapeutic. I met Shadow, and he was…angry, but I think he cared. He cared about me. And the doctors seemed to treat him like an outcast. They diagnosed him with sociopathic tendencies. Psychopathy. And Silver, I don't know what his deal was. He never seemed to give me much of a reason to why he was there. He was kinda shy and reserved and pretty naive. I remembered once he went inside my head and seemed to talk about my mother. I don't know. I don't remember much of my childhood. I remembered a few things when I was like, a baby and then a one year old, but after two everythin' just seemed to disappear. Doctors gave me these pills after the hospital visit, when Shadow died. I take 'em, but I'm not sure if they really help, Amy."

Her glance was brief, before her attention was distracted to the little child. She asked him why his medicine didn't seem to work. Took another swig of beer. He was never an alcoholic, but he seemed to enjoy a good beer a lot. It still felt cool to the touch. We can feel it in his hands, gripping tighter, tighter.

We heard him speak, and he continued.

"They made me take like this Risperdal or whatever it is. I don't think it works. I get muscle twitches and all sorts of wonderful symptoms." We saw him roll his eyes at that. "I take it everyday. Honest. I do. They also make me take some Ambien to go to bed at night. That never helps. I still sleep walk and have a hard time sleeping. And Ames?"

Silence filled the room, like stifled air. She confirms that the infant is asleep and she walks up to him, hearing him. The mother unit believes that Sonic is sick, and needs help, and her digits go near the telephone, about to call her doctors, if it wasn't so late at night. She sighs. Her shoulders relax after heaving. Her breasts bounce. Her breath smells like red wine and pasta. Her eyes are dutifully unaware of how we seem to dash through Sonic's ocular sinister. Fingers twitch. Tails come back from the beach in that late night. No one is at the beach. No one is. And we think everything is so fine, so still, the stars continuing to stay in their field of gravity when he finally states the ugly truth, the thing that can send you back to that mental illness hospital that he never took pleasure in or wanted to partake in ever again.

He said:

"I hear voices in my head sometimes. Please don't think I'm crazy. Cause I'm not. I get a lot of headaches, feel dizzy…the doctors didn't seem to help much of my problems. It's like…an apartment complex in my head. Hearing guys, women, children, all talking at once…It's ridiculous. I never heard anything like this before in my life. Even when I was in that damn loony bin."

The mother unit folds her arms across her chest, listening. Her feet sway to the right. Child unit listens in intently, but not sure what to think. The entire house is quiet. Sonic was in the need for a cigarette.

I brought out a fine hookah (a cigarette) from my purse (bag) and I smoke it, delinquently and listening to what this woman with no fashion sense had to say about us. God, what is she wearing! A Jane Jetson type dress while she wears those ridiculous earrings and her hair all curled up like some sort of doll's face from some thrift store and that head band? Seems like something you get out of a dollar store. I swing my cigarette back and forth, it burning right out of my fingertips, a goddess of fire, if I do say so myself.

That woman with no fashion sense noticed some lumps on Sonic's chest, almost like mountains of breasts, his quills curled back like I'm some sort of doll in a wealthy shop somewhere in this beach district, and my lips were full, plump. They were my best feature.

"Darling," I said, smoking yet more of my hookah, as the beach house looked so derelictly delicate for me, a place that I wanted to live, full of the seaglass marbles in the glass containers and the windows made of pure solid glass where the morning dawn hit, the light breaking through the window and me shining brilliantly like a martyr. I had to remind everyone inside me that we all were once an intact piece of glass. Until we broke.

"Darling," I say again, "You got to change that outfit and your hair. You need to change everything before we go out of here again." My face fluctuates. I try to stick inside the program. If she found out about me and the other losers inside this program's body, I and the others could very well end up in that posh hospital again. I and the others were now in California. It was possible that I and the others could be in a good hospital, but I and the others were sure they wouldn't be able to treat me and the others. And the program itself. The posh program that drinks that disgusting beer and smokes only Camel's. Sometimes I got Virginia Slims, despite whatever the program wanted.

"What did you say?" she asked, and I told her, quite simply, that she needed to be a bit more fashionable, a quality diamond in the rough, before anyone can notice you in SoCal. Her hands seemed to twitch on the phone, holding onto the handle. I tell her she couldn't do a damn thing about the program inside of us. And that me and the others were here forever, and she could just damn very well deal with it.

"Sonic, I don't know what's going on with you…you need help…"

Of course, my sister. The program needed help. But if the program went and got help inside this system, me and the others could very well disappear. Kaput. Gone. Extinct. I was a person too. And I wanted to live, damn it. You're not going to tell anyone about me and the other people inside this program, you slutty bitch.

The phone was hooked into her hands. I grabbed it, pulled it tight, and told her there was nothing she could do about me and the others. I scratched her face with my long claws, Miles telling the program to stop. I laugh. I laugh cause these people were so pathetic. The baby cried. I didn't care. The baby can cry all morning as long as it wanted to. I slap her several times in the cheeks and she slaps me too. A bitch fest.

I told her how dare she even smack my face, the great Mademoiselle Francoise, and I told her I was going out and I was going to take the car keys with me. I was going to shop. I was going to shop for some nice supplies and the bitch couldn't stop me. She threatened to call the police on the program, but I told her I wasn't responsible for anything the program did to her. I was another entity inside the system. I wasn't responsible for anything I clearly did.

The child grabs my legs, asks me what's wrong with the program, and I tell him that I didn't know him at all and I never wanted any goddamn kids in my life. I never wanted anyone to care for. Absolutely no one. Because no one had ever cared for me or the program.

I turn on the car, and I drive. It's a piece of shit, but it still had some gas in the tank. There were some nice stores that opened up at 9 am, and I waited for them to open up while I ate at a very fine diner, unlike that garbage macaroni grill the program went into.

I looked in my small pocket mirror, and oh, how lovely my face was! A heart-shaped face, with blue quills and green eyes and a lovely smile that is sure to swoon all the men. During the nights that both that bitch and the child had spent at the beach home, I drove off in the early hours of morning, looking for men who interested me, who I could expect to croon to my heart. They were delicious, delectable, the men who wanted me. I realized when we had our little nights under the red blazing sun I had no vagina, but it didn't matter to me. I was willing to use this program to achieve my duties, and if that was romancing with other men in a male's body, I was certain enough to do it.

I kissed his lips, and they felt like the sun's dew had collected on them. My legs entwined with his. I told him I loved him, and our hearts beat in our chest until they soon slowed down, and became more intimate, lovely, and I was sure they would be together too.

The sun came up, and I could see the sun's rays collect in his eyelashes. He kissed me again, tasting of it in his delicate lips. He told me I was elegant, divine, and I was a Goddess among so many people. I never wanted to leave him. I felt too comforted by his body, his clean-shaved face, his blond quills. I sat in wait for the sun to come up again at about 9 am, where he cooked me breakfast and I drink some sour coffee off his defunct coffee machine. He asked me where I lived. I told him I lived inside a program of a system full of many other people like me inside, and he laughed and thought I was joking, when truly, I wasn't.

He made eggs and toast and pancakes. I chew the pancakes slowly, I smile embitterly over a man who didn't understand of where I truly came from. He asked me if I was a Trans person due to the irregular shape of my lumps on the program's chest, and I told him no, I was a woman, and he told me I was indeed Trans. I wasn't sure if it was the time and place to argue with him really of my origins and my whereabouts, and I asked the man if he wanted to be with me, shopping. He smirked, telling that I was like a really stereotypical queer but he liked me a lot anyways. I wasn't sure what a queer was used in his context, but I wasn't so sure of SoCal's lingo at times. I ask him if he's got a smoke and he gives me one and I press the cigarette between my fine lips and smoke it as slowly as I could. It was a long day. I knew I had to bring the program back with the bitch and not at all leave any information on what I did. The man lowered his head towards mine and kissed me again, each kiss being as tender as the last. Despite his confusion, I knew he loved me. I knew.

Soon, after all the shopping, all the usual hubbub I typically experience when I'm out of the system and program, and I come home, and the sun is glowing radiantly, so bright like a summer peach, the redness blazing so hotly against my blue quills that I wished were long blonde hair. I get the bags of dresses and clothes and other lavish things for myself into the nice beach home, where the tumultuous waves kick against the home, and I was met with that bitch, the bitch, who never let me be myself.

He apologized. The system had denied me. And he wasn't sure why the bags of clothes were there, why his ass felt tight, why he was gone for all of this time. He wasn't sure why he was smoking a cigarette either. I smoked one in the system, and the blue hedgehog just comments on how he seemed to pass out for several hours and come back in a wreck, without knowing what he did to hurt the bitch. Her look was disconcerting, ha! As if I actually cared for this bitch for a while! She told him to just sit on the couch and talk to her, and Sonic left the clothes on the porch, not even acknowledging my lovelies. His gloves were stained with the tar of cigarette's and he thought it was so strange, that he was a smoker for all what seemed to be a few hours.

"Why can't you remember anything in your life Sonic?" she asked. Oh, how stupid and naive was she. She didn't know of what happened. We tried to protect the children from what happened, but they were scarred. They were destroyed and decimated and their innocence just never was the same. Innocence was what The Core wanted, after all. What the Beast wanted.

The child appeared from the crevices of the room and he listened to him talk. He told him about ever since at the age of 2, most of his life was a complete blank. He remembered when he adopted Tails, yes. He remembered the loony bin. He remembered…the Beast, and he wondered if he would ever appear again. Because his presence never seemed to disappear. He was still inside him. Waiting. Protecting the children inside of him. He never knew he had about 125 of us inside. Oh, how wretched, how diseased Sonic was.

I could dissect Sonic's tears into 2 parts. Two parts, and Sonic cried, and I could divide those by four, by six, by eight…

I don't like seeing him cry! Talking about losing memories, being sad, thinking it had something to do with parts of his childhood…The girl named Amy told him that he had Dissociative Identity Disorder. The doctors were "skeptical" of his diagnosis after he got out of the hospital. I asked her why. And she shook her head and said she didn't know. That he had suffered from these problems for a while and never seemed to acknowledge them.

Were we all sick? Were we all broken parts of something bigger? Like, if I took a vase that was by that girl Amy right now, would that vase…

Break in a million pieces…

And we would see all of us in each piece?

Did Jesus take one single part of his mind and multiplied them by 125?

125, a big number. People have heard of other dissociated people having near a hundred personalities, she said. But nothing like this. Nothing like that.

"Sonic? Are you listening to me?" she asked.

I kept looking at her. I kept looking. I kept looking into her love-shaped face and her beautiful jade eyes and the parted hair and her wondrous dress and I told her she was beautiful and kissed her hand. I loved her. I truly did. I wasn't sure why I had that tingly feeling in my body all of a sudden, down there, but I wasn't sure what to do with that feeling. God gave you that feeling because you are sinful, full of pride, and you must rid of that feeling immediately, by repentance. Praying to the Lord is the only way you could ever redeem yourself for such filthy thoughts.

This program was a big sinner. He had sex with men and he admitted to being trans. Downright despicable! I clicked my prayer beads with the touch of his fingertips. Click clack. I told him he was going to burn in Hell. Click clack. I told him his mother was burning in Hell too. Click clack. I told him so was his father. Click clack.

He prayed fervently. He prayed on the bed while the slut got ready to wear her lingerie. I could feel that this sinful program wanted to touch one of her supple nipples, as she stood breathing against the ceiling, her breasts puckering, back and forth, and the program was sick, depraved, as he told her that he wanted to have romantic relations with her, but felt he didn't have the energy. His breathing felt like his rib cage would collapse, a little hollowed out shell for all of us to live in. His heart. His brain. When he should be giving that to the Lord and not having sex with this slut and those queers. I found myself growing sick as he reached over and touched her vagina, inserting his fingers in. I wanted to protest! I wanted to scream! But somehow, I blacked out like him, as if I had no power, no energy to stop him, and I told him that he betrayed the Lord, and he was going to burn in Hell for all eternity.

My children can attest to that. I was a born again Christian when I very uncomfortable thoughts about the father figure in the program's life. I imagined him as a snake, swallowing me whole. Satan's snake.

He was coated with yucky stuff. His finger, I mean. I thought it was familiar, like I've seen it before. The lady said Sonic's eyes changed, and I wasn't sure what she meant. I said I felt yucky and I told her if I could go to the bathroom and pee. She said that the program didn't sound right and she wondered if he was becoming "sick" again. "Sick" is her word for us. That we're the sick people. Not mommy who made me do all of those yucky things. Not daddy who hurt us. Yucky, bad bad bad things. I told her I felt bad, and she came in, and I wanted to say no! I didn't want her to come in! I wanted to be alone! I didn't want mommy to come in and hurt me!

I ran the bathwater and told her I was going to drown in it and I was going to cut off my fingers. But it was the program's fingers, and I thought that would be mean. She said she really wanted to come in. I was really scared and curled near the pee pee toilet and cried and I kept rocking back and forth like a rocky horse. She came in and she was wearing something a little nicer, not something I remember the mommy wore. She said she wanted to pick me up and hold me. I wanted her to. I wanted her to love me for the rest of my life. I wanted to be happy with her and grow old with her. I wanted to rescue her, and not have everyone seem to rescue me so often.

Was I always so afraid? Maybe that's why they call me Tim the Timid.

"Is that what they call you?" she asked, my head in her lap. I tried to be calm and okay. She pet my hair and kept whispering nice, babyish things to me, but that was okay, cause I liked it. I liked it when she sung about the black sheep, and the baby in the tree tops, and the mockingbird that I always imagined was so scary and not at all a nice thing to give to someone like me.

Something sweet happened to me. She gave me a kiss on the head. And I've never been kissed by a girl before.

He was shy, reluctant, yet never wanted to leave Amy. He felt he loved her, more than the program did, and the child never wanted her to stop singing lullabies to her, even when he fell asleep!

It's hard coaxing Tim out of his little nervous breakdowns, but treat him like his actual age and he'll go to sleep faster than the child that woke up from the crib, crying and yearning for milk, the tasty treats in Amy's breasts.

She was taking care of her husband. She was taking care of children. She was taking care of someone who's as selfish and egotistical as Francoise, and she had to see the strangeness in that is Incisor, chopping up things to several individual pieces. Why he did this, we were never sure. I guess he wanted to be a surgeon. A surgeon that wanted to see how everything worked as a unit.

Soon, Incisor was going to chop all of us up, and see how we reacted to being sliced. With surgical instruments. Tools. Bloody instruments that were rusted and hurt even worse when that needle went inside the palm of your hand, twisting the dead, necrotic flesh and make your pain something awful…

Incisor was going to learn a lot from the program's momma. He already knew too much. And I can't protect him any further.

I can't protect these personalities further from discovery. Not all of them had been found, but it's imperative I don't show the rest to Amy, his wife. How can I tell his wife that he had been sleeping with men while some of the more seductive Others come out, like Francoise? Even Elvie had a few men around her finger at times. I had to shut down everything, make sure that he couldn't completely know about us until the time was right. He seemed to forget about the conversation he had about his wife, about the DID diagnosis. Can doctors be skeptical about something that appeared as clear and as white as the stars in the sky? How could I protect the Core when it had been scarred too much by the actions of his mother and father? How could I be so foolish to let them hurt that part of his mind?

Sticky things were on his fingers when he was two. She told him to come to her room when he was two. She told him to pull out his penis when he was two. He was two. He was two. He was two.

He sat, watching the waves filter the light on the ceiling. He tried to listen to the waves produce their musical magic, falling asleep at that 4 AM morning, after burning out another cigarette and looking at pictures of France on his phone. She sighed, laid down her body where breasts seemed to grow like hard milky lumps that reminded me of the grainy meatballs his mother would make, and she fell asleep, before she would sneak into the dawn and seduce more men into her fake shell, her fake body that would flake and break slowly, into 125 pieces.


	5. 5 (Vignette)

The darkness surrounded us like an infinitesimal pool. The house very rarely had working electricity. Often, the program had to write his stories and do his homework by candlelight. He imagined the home in a blazing exploding fragment of where he lived, in the middle of God knows fucking where, Michigan.

I hated him. I hated him. I hated him.

He stood watching us while we were playing with a plastic toy car, a little piece of cheap ass shitty ass plastic for us to chew on and mumble our words, as the program thought about sucking on it. It wasn't his fucking mother's titties, I can tell you that.

He was three years old. Three when he was hurt. Three was a lucky number for his father to hurt him.

The silk red tie he wore around his neck. I liked to imagine myself strangling him with it. With the black belt he wore around his waist that was so tight it cut off circulation. Stick thin, he certainly wished to be, that chubby little bastard.

Once was so small, now so tall and fat and a piece of shit.

The father grinned. I expected him to play with us. He took the toy out of the program's mouth, the trail of saliva leading to his father's fingers. The children peeped from their canvases in the program's eyes, preparing to be made. We had sex with the Others to make them. They were our children, and our children alone. And they were hurt, torn, abused.

The father slapped his shoulder with a force that made the program cry. It was too harsh. The father didn't want to harm, he merely wanted to be affectionate. But the father never knew how to handle children. He was nearly infantile in the care of infants. He shoved the bottle into his mouth until he nearly suffocated in an onslaught of milk. He never imagined patting his back for him to burp. Babies knew how to vomit by themselves, after all. He asked him if there was something he needed to pry his gummy teeth on. Sonic wasn't sure at all what he meant. He teethed years ago. He just liked the sensation of chewing. The sensation of suckling. He sucked his thumb whenever he was comforted and happy and content, much to the dismay of his father calling him too young to act exactly like he was only a few months old. There was some unconscious desire embedded in him to suckle. He found comfort in it. The only comfort he could get from their yelling and screaming in the middle of the night.

What do you mean I can't drink anymore?

You leave me here alone with the baby, while you get yourself wasted at the bars with your damn friends! We promised! We promised we would be through this together!

In sickness and in health, right?

Yes!

Well, I'm neither sick or alive. I'm in the fading gray, and I want to drink to feel something once in my life.

There was no answer to that in their ramshackled home, and they left it at that while the baby cried mercilessly.

It needed repairs. They both knew that. But they often did nothing about it. The mother unit was a nurse, working long shifts. The father unit went to some paper printing company for eight hours, then came home, drank till he was tired, then fell asleep. Like a baby with sweet warm milk.

We should be doing something, about the baby…

He was getting ready for work, as we watched him tie himself up with tie-noose, and he said he thought of killing himself at his job. Low pay, same shit everyday, his eyes growing darker and darker each time the child had gazed at him.

I just wanted Daddy to love me. His Daddy. My Daddy never came back.

He put on his cologne, he prepared to flicker-light a cigarette, a lone candle in the darkness of the home other than the razorbladed morning light, and the program named Sonic had latched onto his legs like a sea frilly, and he wanted him to notice me, notice us, notice him. He wanted a hug, a goodnight kiss, anything, and he told him he loved him and to have a good day of work.

Sonic thought of that moment at that time, and he could hear the fly being zipped down of his trousers. He wasn't sure what to think, but even when Sonic had no concept of guns or death or suicide (we taught him all of this at the age of one, subconsciously), when his Daddy told him that he wanted to put a gun down his throat and pull the trigger, he wanted that more than anything. He would rather have a gun in his mouth and his father pulling the trigger than what looked like a pale, slimy, hairy snake between almost-clenched teeth.

He vomited on it, but Daddy told him to keep sucking. Else he'll kill him and his mother too.

But at the time, he loved his mother, and he did what he told him to.

In sickness and his health, he would take care of his mother.

Even if she was just like Daddy.


	6. 6 (Regular)

I sat completely still, stiff. If I moved, the world would be destroyed.

Catatonic. I was often called catatonic. That was my name. Catatonia. I lied in my soft nest, seeing the sunlight dance on my eyelids, and I see the wife trying to make a breakfast for the program. I wasn't sure if he was at all aware of all of us. He was sick, very sick. And I wished I could kiss him, if all my arms and legs weren't in plaster and cemented.

Just like Cash in As I Lay Dying.

"Sonic, it's time for breakfast! I made you an extra slice of Canadian bacon!"

I lied completely still, stiff. I can smell the meat cooking in the air. It smelled delicious. Yet I couldn't move. My eyes couldn't even blink.

"Sonic?"

I thought about several things. How his wife seemed to love him. If he was still sick in all of these years, I was sure she would divorce him. And we would be lonely again. We would be as lonely as the moon in the sky…

"Sonic?"

I lied completely still, stiff, as she came in through the door and smelled my dead corpse wafting in the air.

I looked dead, I smelled dead. I heard death coming through the windows. I heard death coming with his skeletal horse, I can hear him breathing on me, telling me that God couldn't save us now. God was dead, and I was sick. I drank some Pennyroyal tea while I lied softly against the sun, the sun, the sun, wanting to drench its black rays on me.

I felt sick, all the time. My bones ached, the psoriasis had made my body bloody and scaly. I could see the petals of my skin fall on the bed, the bloody flakes like roses.

"Sonic, it's time for breakfast! Are you okay?"

No, I wasn't.

I lied completely still, stiff, and the wife comes upstairs, asking if he wanted any coffee and if he was okay. I managed to stifle a "yes, and coffee would be nice" when my eyes seemed to pop from my sockets as if I was under 20,000 feet in the sea. I felt so ill I wasn't sure why the wife always had to check on me. I was sure I was dying. I was going to die surely, fall into a coffin where it would close on me, and then I would be shut against the dirt of the earth and hear Satan's demons scratching against the sides of it, telling me that I was very welcomed to go to Hell.

I was surprised that Mary Contrary didn't come when I spoke of Hell. She always was such a fanatic about it. Clicking her prayer beads, talking about how we were all sinners and we would burn there, when I was very sure the place didn't exist anyways. It never existed. It was just to keep the bad people from doing bad things. But when bad people no longer believed in God, they did bad things anyways.

The skin flakes were my rose petals. They were my invitation to the wife to sit with me, wondering what was going on with her husband. I wasn't sure. No one was sure. I told her that I loved her, even if I believed I was going to die any minute now and I truly didn't know who she was. I took a sip of the Pennyroyal. I could smell the waffles and the strawberries lining up on the crevices and center, and it waited invitingly for me to eat them, but I wasn't hungry. I was deathly tired.

"Why do you believe you're going to die, Sonic?"

I corrected her. My name was Catatonia. And I was going to die any day now, any minute.

She wasn't sure what to think about us. Our many facets of Sonic's personality. We were a diamond and we were shattered, once upon a time. I remember suckling his mother's breast, questioning on what I did was wrong. Then touching her sexually that caused my skin to peel off. I wondered if it was wrong too, as I was young too, that soon I grew old and wretched and bitter and my skin was corroded like an old battery.

I was about 40, the age where many people seemed to die off. Heart disease, heart failure, diabetes. I had many illnesses. The wife tried to tell me I was in a body full of life, but I wasn't so sure anymore. Sonic seemed like he would die too someday. By his own hand.

"You can't say that," she said, biting her lip contemptuously.

But yes, I did.

Sonic had suffered from us for such a long time. Since at the age of two. He once was a whole product at the beginning of his life. We weren't sure what happened to that. But I came out when Sonic, at the ripe, bloody and smelling age of two, was forced to sit completely still, his hands completely flat at their sides, as his mother laid on top of him and well, rape is not a very pretty word, but it was what happened. And I was sorry about it and tried to take care of him, along with other people that were born at the time. Since then, Sonic was only being completely flat like his body had been at the time, passively accepting everything his mother and father had done to him. Many terrible things, I told her, that I didn't care to go through many of them.

She was silent. For a few moments, she considered every word I said, as if every morsel was open to observation and scrutiny, and those words weren't exactly delicious I told her. They seemed to be rotten and undercooked.

She asked me if I could come with her to the kitchen and help Sonic eat. I said I would, though I felt like the sun sapped every inch of my strength. Fibromyalgia always seemed to get worse in the morning, though in the afternoon it isn't so bad. At night it got worse, but somehow, I had more energy and I tried to finish things. Those things never seemed to get finished, however, because I was often too sick, too ill, and I held a ratty Kleenex to my nose, counting out the minutes I would lie in my grave. Sonic's bones ached inside me. I often thought I actually lived near in the Middle Ages, with the plague doctors gazing at me and burning rosaries and perfumes so they could not be infected by my disease.

I had the disease. The worst kind of disease that could be inflicted on man. On women and children.

Whispered.

(Depression).

She laid out the food for me. She was very kind.

It tasted good, like I expected. I told her she was a good chef, and the strawberries tasted ripe, and the Canadian bacon was cooked to perfection.

I knew she liked me, as an individual personality, but she was confused, as to why I was depressed, why I had these many illnesses, and she seemed to want to tell me that everything would be alright, even if I knew that wasn't the truth. I knew I was dying. Nothing can save me from that inevitability. She held my hand, and the child looked up to me with those eyes, along with the baby in the crib. Sonic's split personality. The baby was our creation, and we had to keep it safe, but he ventured out.

He never spoke, and his fingers were always so sticky of some foreign substance.

I felt comforted by her hospitality. She seemed to notice I was cold, giving me a layer of blankets to eat my food in. She even asked if I needed a cigarette, and I said no thank you, I never wanted to smoke. She said I smoked before, but that was only Francoise, who was a heavy chain smoker and always looked at fancy-shmancy pictures of France and always spent around 500 dollars at fancy-shmancy stores. I never liked her but I never told her my opinion of her. It seemed useless to convince her that she wasn't anything like how she thought of herself.

I sneezed a lot on the food. I felt I would spray the plague to the girl, but she told me to just eat the food and not to worry about anything. I felt it was like 800 years I last ate. I asked her of how she could afford this nice beach house in California, and she said that it actually once belonged to Sonic's mother. And she gave it to him when she died.

I dropped my fork on the table. It made a loud clatter.

The bitch, giving us something for once in our godawful lives.

Why did she give Sonic something nice, when truly, she hated him? I remember the slappings, the threats of her chopping his head off with a razor blade, the time she even forced us to eat our own puke, I was completely baffled as to why she made us seem so privileged now, in her nice beach house.

I couldn't forget the smell of Sonic's chili dogs, bathed in his own red-pink puke.

Where had she got the money for something like this anyways? While Sonic's mother was rich, she never spent any of the money on repairs of the home we lived in, nor any money on his father's diabetes and other medical expenses. She was selfish and only spent the money on herself. She never at once thought about her own son that she molested and raped, or about the man she married who was constantly suffering from failed organs that had to be hooked up to dialysis machines as his fat ass sat on that Laz-E-Boy chair, watching his shows. He was also semi-retarded after the accident that Sonic once inflicted on his father, in a fit of rage.

Yes, that moment where we wanted him to suffer yet God had decided he would get back at us by making his father turn into a complete child that needed to be taken care of because his mother ignored him completely.

Always the nice things in her kitchen. She always called it her kitchen. As if anyone else wanted to own it. Rats often scurried on the floors. Cigarette ashes were on the counters, along with his father's dribble and snot when he looked for a beer or some white wine. (He also couldn't breathe very well, I whispered.)

Mother would always sit with a glass of wine in her hand, watching PBS or some fancy-shmancy movie. Sometimes Sonic would crawl to her, gazing up at her face and expecting something from her. He was one at the time. Sonic's mother was once at least a decent mother. She actually tried to take care of him and feed him and all that other stuff. Why she later abused him I really wasn't sure. Once was a decent mother. Then turned into a class A abuser. Sometimes she forced Sonic to watch porn with her when he was about five years old. She said she was lonely and her husband never gave her any attention. At the end of every session she would kiss Sonic tenderly and give him a cookie. He wasn't what he did was right. Everything felt wrong about it. He often grew sick and threw up. When his mother found out he threw up his lunch she made for him, she would smack him and tell him to eat his vomit. And well, I'm not sure if I want to go any further than that. It all seemed so sick, to imagine that his mother would reward him for being her own little sex slave.

That was all I thought of it.

She shook her head and told me that she never knew those things happened to Sonic. She understood that DID was often caused by some kind of traumatic event, but with something like that, she can understand why he would want to split up too.

I lied completely still, stiff, on the bed. I told the wife that I was sick. I told her I was sick with depression and all kinds of other problems. She asked no questions about it. She told me to just get some rest, and she'll bring me lunch in a couple of hours.

I never experienced such kindness from complete strangers before. Often when I came out, I was met with hostility, on why Sonic was acting so strange, so suddenly feminine and sick and weakly. The father tried to get Sonic to play soccer in his younger years, but often I heaved and could only run for so long before I would pass out on the field. Then his father would tell me on how much of a piece of shit I was and he would smack me over and over. I never explained to him that I wasn't Sonic. He wouldn't understand (and would, in fact, make the situation worse.).

The bed felt comfortable, the cotton and linen all wrapped up nicely in my rusty old bones. I heard the waves crash against the shore near the sunlight where the window stood away from me, and I wondered if her and her child would actually have some fun at the beach instead of worrying about me and Sonic all the time.

I would hope so. I would hope, I would hope, I would hope.

I suddenly felt as if my leg was chopped off, the sinister spirits around me telling me that his mother's ghost was back, out to rape us once more! I got up on my one leg and tried to escape whilst finding the other missing piece to my soul, but I fell on the cold, hard floor and had to crawl around as if I was an insect again. A nefarious little cockroach, eating the last remains of the lunch that his wife left for him to eat, along with the dinner that tasted so fine. I ate all of that and felt like vomiting again. Ate too much. I always ate too much. Upon my broken and cast-off leg I searched for more food in the cupboards. Ate some chocolate, some cookies, even some baby food that the wife had bought for the little one. I ate everything. We ate everything. I felt like I hadn't ate in so many years, when truly, I just wanted to get the experience of vomiting again. To lose weight, for sexual excitement? No, I just wanted to relieve the abuse. I wanted to be right back where I was. A Thing. A POS. That was all I was. I ate more and more and suddenly I burst and I threw up in the toilet. Look at how brown it is, so shit-colored, and I scraped my fingers and hands around the edge of the bowl and ate the last remnants of the cookies and soup that was once palatable food before and I could taste the acid in my mouth but I didn't care I kept eating I kept eating I kept eating I threw up again I kept eating...

The wife noticed me. She asked me what the hell I was doing and she asked for my name. I told her I was simply called Emet. I told her it was what I did to go on with my life. Eat, drink, vomit, then dance around in the pink substance as if it was heaven. It was the only part of myself that was real. It was the only thing that reminded me that I was alive. The clutching of the chest, the waterfall that came from my mouth, and the wife tried to drag me out of the toilet and I screamed and cried and kept telling her she was a bitch and she was taking away my happiness. She ordered me to take a shower else she'll call the doctor. She'll call the doctor and the doctor says, no more monkeys jumping around in this hedgehog's head...

She shoved me inside and closed the curtains and I was met with an onslaught of water that came from Iceland's geysers. I attempted to claw my way out, even scratching the wife's face, but she said she was only doing it for my own good. My own damn good. The child woke up and wondered what she was doing, and he clutched to her as his father was covered in brown babyshit vomit and he was scared for me he really was he asked me who I was and I told him I was Emet and I could sense a twisted face that I smelled dirty and I was a terrible being and I wanted him to put me out of my misery just make me vomit, make me drown in my vomit I was so sick I was so irreparably broken that I knew there was nothing he could do I was dead I knew I would be.

Soon, I was all clean. Like a newborn baby when the nurses come over and wipe that birth gunk off him. When Sonic was born, we weren't sure if he needed us. Sonic was just a shell of a person back then. We saw that his mother was a broken person and that she would hurt him meanwhile the father was an alcoholic and left him alone on those awful stark blue and white nights.

We weren't sure if Sonic could even answer our questions. We thought of him merely as a program that couldn't respond to anything, and wasn't even aware of the certain functions we make. We thought we owned his body and he didn't. But I thought I could hear him screaming like a petulant child who wanted a candy bar, asking what was wrong with him, tears in his eyes, the sniffles, the works, and he wanted us out of his body when we came here first and we were here since he was born. In fact, God made me first before him. I was the original personality before him. I was the original!

No, I was!

No, I'm very sure I was.

Shut up! You're just a bitch!

Emet, no one likes you!

I'm real, real as all y'all!

I'm the real deal! I'm the real personality! He's just a shell!

There was fighting inside of him. Much fighting, as everyone in the apartment of his head clamored and rose over like the waves in the sea, and God bless us, we kept fighting and we kept rolling over like the waves in the ocean, even the children fought! Bless those darlings! We fought and fought and the child soon held us while we were in the darkness of the program's room and we kept counting how many seconds it would take for the waves to calm down and this storm to be over with...

1, 2, 3, 4...

The waves kept coming. We kept hearing the mermaids and the sirens singing and the waves licking the home and I couldn't stop plucking the quills in Sonic's hair because I was so nervous, so nervous, and then more personalities came over and fought and it was a battleground and I just sat under his desk where he wrote his meticulous letters and watched the waves coming further, further, further...

I thought I was going to die. My chest heaved, though I didn't want Emet to get a hard-on over the vomit we would spill. The seagulls that were near the shore careened away, the storm rumbled over the home and I could smell the scent of rain collecting on the glass windows, and instantly everything seemed to come alive so vividly, I could see the colors in the girl's face grow greener, fuller, pinker, like flowers blooming. The son was becoming inches longer, like grass growing in the outskirts of the beach. I couldn't stand it anymore! I had to get out of this damn house and stop all this cowering as if I expected them to do everything for me!

The Beast is coming the Beast is coming the Beast is coming the Beast is coming...

The waves grew larger, and I could see other personalities that lied dormant for a while rise out of the sea as if they were completely washed ashore by some kind of sunken ship so far away. They were zombies, with arms outstretched, with these born personalities that wanted to meet Amy and Miles and the baby that shrilly screamed in the corner...

If I didn't get out of this body and became an independent body like the infant Sonic soon, I swear to God I was going to stab someone, preferably Sonic, the bastard who took over my body!

Now Shadow, we shouldn't act this way towards him...He might not like that at all...

Shut up!

The Others tried to restrain me like they did back at that damned hospital. Put me in a restraint that would choke me and bind me and so call end my life. Fuck that. I bounded after the knives and told that if Amy and Miles tried to call the doctor or 911 or whoever I was going to stab him. I was going to stab him and it would be the end of dear old Sonic.

5, 6, 7, 8...

She really wanted to call his doctor, Dr. Brunson. And tell him that he was insane and he needed to be in restraints and be taken to that goddamn loony bin again. I told her if she threatened me with that I might as well stab her too. I could see the fear in their eyes. I can even smell it. Good, I said, good.

The storm clouds were ebony, rolling out their piano tunes of a storm that was going to break the beach house. I told them, no, they shouldn't worry about us. Don't call the police. Don't call the psychiatrists. I just wanted to be split. I wanted to be a separate person, and so did the rest.

9, 10, 11, 12...

Babies kept counting. I kept threatening. Amy kept threatening. Babies kept crying. Child kept crying. Knife kept being shiny, so smooth against Sonic's belly when I scraped it against him...

It was an instinct of mine to play with knives. To not even realize that I was bleeding so harshly against the glinting white and the stone and marble of the counters. I was bleeding, irreparably.

The storm kept clacking against the windows. The rain kept coming. I kept bleeding. The waves were coming further, about to crack the window of our little world...

"I don't want to call the hospital on you, but Sonic...Sonic..."

I wasn't Sonic, you bitch.

"But you're sick. You're very sick. You need help. Help that I can't give you."

No. NO.

You weren't going to do this shit on us again!

His belly was bleeding like an ulcer. A geyser of blood. I grabbed the knife despite so much pain flowing through my body and I aimed it directly on the bitch's eye, when I couldn't even see what stopped me. Violent, was I? Only because I was dealt with so much pain in the past that it wasn't right for me to continue on anymore, inside this damn shell of a body when this body was mine, mine, mine...

No, it wasn't yours.

My quills were glowing white on the sun of the noonday storm. I could see the black and red hedgehog, wanting to cause harm to her family with his vengeance. But I told him, we'll get this all taken care of soon. Trust me. We'll be alright.

My aura seemed to calm him, as it always did with the other people inside Sonic's head. The knife fell like the moon in the sky, the half-slitting blade falling to rest on the marble floor. I could see blood all over the kitchen, and I told Amy that she needed to bandage his wounds, do the best she can with him, and we would try to give him the best medical help possible. I told her that going to the mental hospital wouldn't solve much in the end, as our disorder was very rare, very hard to cure and I was sure they truly didn't understand. Amy's face, constantly her eyes had diminished and grown larger, but I had to urge her to calm down as I split from his body, and tried to help her too.

The child got out the first-aid kit, and we dressed his wounds accordingly. Sonic was fast asleep, unconscious, unaware completely of what happened.

His bandages had glowed red under the light. I told her we could take him to the hospital soon enough. I just wasn't sure if it would be so wise to try to tell the situation to the paramedics that Sonic had so many personalities in his head, and that we would have to see him shipped off to a place they didn't want to be in at all. Let's avoid the mental hospital, I said. Let's come up with a story on what happened.

"Why are you so afraid of going to the hospital, Mr..."

Guardian, I said. My name was Guardian and I protected the Core and everything else. And I'm the only hope it was for me to make sure the Beast didn't come and hurt Sonic again.

Hospitals around this area just didn't seem to understand, I said. They mostly treat drug addictions and delusional celebrities after the paparazzi abused them. They never seen a case as severe as this. They never saw what possibly was a hedgehog with 125 personalities in his head.

And they asked him if he truly had that many, and I said yes.

He has so many...and I protect them all. Though Emet does what she does best and eat the vomit off the rims of toilet seats because she kind of has a high eating vomit, after Sonic's parents had forced him to eat his vomit after his mother served him with some poison and she wondered why he wouldn't eat his food. Or, well, I shouldn't say "wondered". She put it in there willingly and wanted to kill Sonic, but somehow, we made him alive and even stronger. With Emet eating the vomit off the toilet with relish. And it was a very disgusting, but sad and true fact.

"What about the child that's sleeping in the crib in the other room?" she asked.

He split off him, I said. He somehow became real and now you have to take care of him. He was Sonic before he was abused and trampled on. Before they raped him and molested him. He is Sonic, completely and irrevocably.

I told them of how much of a chance they had now, in making sure Sonic was taken care of, that these personalities could finally rest in his head.

"What do you mean? That if we take care of that baby that came out of him, that we can kind of prevent what happened in the past and make the other personalities have a good future?"

Possibly, I said, my fur glowing so bright that she had to shield her eyes. It's a chance for him to live a good childhood. He never truly had one. And if you can comfort us during this hard time where his mother...

I wasn't sure if I could say it. Something terrible had happened here. I could tell. The only one that held that memory of what she did to him here was the Beast, and we truly didn't want him again. Or Shadow.

"So was Shadow really...another..."

Yes. Yes, he really was another personality. And so was Silver.

I held her hand. It shook, still, with the events that happened not too long ago. I kissed them gently, like Sonic would've done. I can tell she was crying. She asked me if she could get Dr. Brunson on the phone, and I wasn't sure if she could do that cause he still wasn't sure how to delicately handle us.

We didn't want medicine to be "corrected". There was nothing to correct in us. We just are. We are just different parts of Sonic's personality to help cope with many traumatic events. And he survived, using this trick that only children seemed to learn. Very imaginative children.

"I've never known Sonic was imaginative, but...I'm still going to call him and tell him some of what's going on. But I promise I won't make you go to the hospital. If you think it won't help, then we don't have to go, but we have to at least go to a medical hospital and just...say something like Sonic fell. I'm...really not sure what we can do other than tell the truth."

I wasn't sure either. A lie about Sonic tripping and falling didn't seem to suffice. It all seemed that we had to tell what happened and either suffer the consequences of the loony bin or jail time or something else. We all were afraid. We thought of the hospital as nothing but a prison, never letting us out ever again, forcing us to take colorful little pills and wrapping us in jackets while giving us Pennyroyal tea to drink.

We didn't want the pills. The therapeutic sessions with doctors who didn't understand us. The media attention we'd get since DID is such a sensationalist thing in California. We agreed to go if Amy tried to convince Dr. Brunson that we didn't had to go. To the loony bin, the loony bin, the loony bin...

Aren't we nothing but just a bunch of bonkers? We're crazy! All of us were insane! And while Amy called 911, her hands and feet trembling as Tails tried to calm me down, I told him that I didn't want to go, that I didn't want to be fed with pills and Thorazine and called insane by all the other patients...

The paramedics came. Sonic was still passed out, unconscious. And we shut ourselves off, and we shut the system off, if only for a few minutes. We listened to the gentle humming of the ambulance, the sirens wailing, Amy wailing, Tails wailing, and I realized that this wasn't Kansas anymore. This wasn't a happy, fun, elegant place to be anymore. No, this wasn't Kansas anymore.


	7. 7 (Vignette)

I prayed to God that night. I prayed to him every night. I click-clacked my prayer beads. I heard the monsters strolling near the program's door. I can smell his breath of alcohol, the lady's smell of fancy perfume on her wrists and neck.

They were demons, sent from Hell to torture me! This was God's test for me! I prayed and prayed and prayed but yet they still wouldn't stop getting near the door, screaming, yelling, the father becoming more belligerent.

Click clack. Click clack. Click clack. The prayer beads never seemed to help. I had them because it was a compulsive need to feel safe. Like how I washed my hands several times a day. Only several. They were rough and callused underneath his gloves. He wasn't sure how it happened. But I told him. I told him. And he didn't seem to accept it.

The beasts kept coming. I can smell their hot breath upon my breasts, on the program's chest. The bitch of a woman told him that she never had once abused him, yet she kept groping him, touching him, and I wanted her to stop, and felt as if I needed to piss on the bed. I wanted them to stop. I wanted them to go somewhere else, where I wouldn't have to deal with their shit.

The praying never worked. I felt like God never watched us, even though He was a multiple Himself.

She kept coming closer, while the husband seemed to smell the fear in my breath. I didn't want them here. I was writing. I was writing something that would set me free. This story. This story. It was all my creation. It was the only thing I had.

I smelled the rusty hinges of the blade near my neck, as she told me that, somehow in a cry of mockery of her supposed innocence of never touching this child, she told me I had to lie flat on the ground and just allow her to assume the position again. The husband watched, with yellow, lupus-drenched eyes. I tried to speak, but she cut a sliver of the program's neck with her razor. It hurt. It hurt so bad. I didn't want to hurt even further, but it was all I could do, to protect him and the Others.

The night was hot, fetid, and I smelled the rotting corpses of rats underneath the floorboards. I could see the moon, the moths that hung in the air like flies stuck to flypaper, wanting to get in for the program's candlelight.

A moth to a flame. If only we had lightbulbs. But we didn't.

She kept straddling him, fondling him, and it made me feel sick. I wanted to do something about it for once, not just to take it and say nothing about it. The moon was sickly hot underneath the skin. I tried to grab her razor, and she fought back, slashing the sheets of the bed, the light blue linen being more destroyed than what it was (with piss stains and blood and even cum) and my palm was bleeding, odious oxygen-rich blood coming out of our bodies as if we were a smiling pig ready to be braised for a Christmas oven, I grabbed the razor and could feel it slice my hands, but I was able to take it. I took it. And then I started slashing her. Slashing her like she was that same pig. And she screamed, the little piggy screamed! With her glorious body fit for an empress bleeding like that fine roast I wanted her father to fucking eat, she managed to retrieve her cell phone and call 911, that her son had gone crazy. Of course, she wasn't going to let them in the house, else the paramedics would question why she never dressed the house up like she dressed herself up. An unfit mother taking care of a mentally ill son. How ridiculous would she look, holding her son, her 11 year old son, saying that he was insane and needed to be locked up in the hospital? The hospital that was down the road from this nowhere Kansas city, putting him in straightjackets and giving him a vial of pills every day. We didn't want it. We wanted to kill her and put her in the oven. Have her husband, the pig he was, eat another pig. And when they arrived outside of the home, she started crying and screaming, her histrionic dramatics that her son was crazy and needed to be sent away, how insane he was to hurt his very own loving mother with a rusty razor.

She claimed the other razor marks on her was him cutting himself. And they believed her. They believed in every morsel of lies she fed them. It was bullshit.

Catatonia set in at the realization that Sonic had to be sent away. He tried to tell them the truth of what his mother did. But they loved his mother. They saw her in the movies and weren't even going to criticize her shabby house and the rotting boards that could sink your body into the dark attic, where her dead babies lived. The babies she was never charged for, just to get attention.

A nurse, a movie star. She lived the dream of Americana.

While an 11-year-old child had to be sent to an insane asylum for other children like him. And did they believe him that he might've had multiple personalities? Dissociative identity? No.

They said he was schizophrenic, cut and dry case.

They gave him medications that sent us to sleep. The other children were afraid of us, but they might as well be, because we were hurt, and scared, and we didn't want to go through this, so many times in our life.

When the bitch came back to pick us up she talked about how well-behaved he was, so tired and sleepy and doped up on Elanvil. After she made nice little chit-chat to the doctors and nurses, telling them they did a wonderful job with her son, we met her in her Rolls-Royce, where she proceeded to slap us and tell us that she was God and we could do nothing to her, nothing, else she'll send us to an even worse hospital than here.

And we listened.

And we never fought back again.


	8. 8 (Vignette)

The night was chillingly cold. It froze our bones. It was autumn, and we never saw the leaves sprout so many beautiful colors that day. Red, orange, yellow, some rustic colors that reminded us that we would all die inside, until we were suddenly reborn. Phoenixes lived in autumn. I like to think that.

It was a happy moment for us. School was starting. We got to get away from the mother and father figure for a few hours. We tied our shoelaces neatly and tightly and we packed all our school supplies. We made ourselves some lunch meat to bring to school for lunch, whatever was left over that the rats didn't eat. He mostly wanted hot dogs and to have a can of chili with him to simmer his hotdogs in even when they're cold. He was six years old and he already knew how to prepare his own lunch and to get ready for the bus. His mother never told him she was proud of him for that. She was never proud of him for anything.

The morning clouds were gray, silverred, and we were prepared to hear the honking of the horn, the sound of the engines vibrating, the door opening and closing shut behind us, allowing us to forget about the bitch for a while. I told Sonic some stories that I once told back when he was a baby, the tales of us defeating a dragon such as his mother, a beast like his father.

Oh, in speak of the fucking devil. There he was, in his Sudan, waving to us, acting so friendly even if we didn't want to speak to him. The child nearly pissed his pants in fear over the man coming over so early, telling him that he was fired from his job and it was the happiest thing he could experience. We didn't want to talk to him. We just wanted to go to school.

Catatonia set in.

My bones ached as he squeezed me. The first affection I ever had from his father. I simply stood still and stared head-on. I didn't want anything from him. School, school, we must go to school, I said in my head...

He seemed to be offended by our constant withdrawal of his attention. He told us that he never felt loved by us. That sometimes he wished he had a different child other than us. Again, before the accident, our father was acting childish, and we assumed he got fired cause of alcohol. His breath smelled like sharp, pungent booze.

"Look at you, all ready to go to school. Not caring about this family. Just wanting to get an education. Did you know that you're not going to be anything when you grow up anyways? You're bound to be a failure, just like ol' papa. Just like your father."

His words sounded as if he was hissing, Satan speaking his words to Eve. The father gave him an apple and tempted to bite into it, soon ashamed of the things that happened in the house with him and his parents.

We tried to look forward to the sinking sun underneath the silver skies, that the school bus would be here any moment now.

He could see some flakes of snow fall into the Earth. At first he thought it was his father's flakes from his scalp. It snowed. Christmas was coming. It was time for Christmas.

He wanted him to pay attention to him. Do anything. But we kept looking. We kept looking for salvation. And soon, the school bus was in the distance, ready to traverse to us. The father figure grabbed the scruff of Sonic's shirt, unaware of the bus driver seeing the abuse that was happening, and he told him to give him love, because he was desperate for it, cause his bitch of a wife never gave him any.

The bus was coming...It was coming...Sonic reached for it with his cold, quivering fingertips, as if it was a tangible object to hold...

Why the father was acting erratic, we weren't sure. He was very drunk, that was all we knew. He wanted some form of acknowledgment for his recent escapades. He got fired. Yadda yadda yadda. No one cared. We wanted to go to school, but the father carried us with his strength and brought us inside the sickly house, constantly screaming at our face like a hissing viper, striking our face and infecting us with his poison.

The bus came. They honked for him. The bus driver even shouted his name. He never missed one day of school before.

The father smacked us, continued shouting, even threw chairs against the walls to get our attention. Sonic continued grasping for the bus outside. He wanted to escape. He wanted to be free.

The bus driver soon left, the child never picked up for school. The father grabbed his weak arms and told him of what he'll do to his pet hamster, Gideon. Catatonia set in. I tried to not give him any satisfaction, tried to give him no implicit emotions. He grabbed the hamster. I continued gazing into his eyes with a dead expression. He grabbed the hamster. He grabbed it, he grabbed it. He squeezed it. He squeezed it. He squeezed it till its eyes popped open. We couldn't look. We were afraid. We felt so sad for Gideon, his organs crushed, his body mangled by this beast of a father.

His hands were bloody, washing them with a cloth. Why he did this we didn't truly know. Drunk. That was the only excuse he gave. Drunk.

Sonic, at once, showed the only emotions that he tucked away for so long, as he truly loved Gideon. He cried. He sobbed on the floor next to the hamster's broken disfigured mess and we tried to comfort him. We tried to tell him that we loved him, and we would always love him. He picked the dead mess up and put it in a shoebox, got a spade and buried him in the backyard. There was no makeshift tombstone as he didn't want his father destroying what little sanctity he had inside his soul.

Gideon, Gideon, Gideon...We missed you...

He vowed to hate him. He vowed it. His father was a despicable man, running in here with a glass of wine in his hand like some kind of fruity-ass connoisseur. The hedgehog pounded his bed as if it suddenly became as sharp as a knife, stabbing the pillows, his father, repeatedly, till he grew so exhausted with turmoil and sadness that he fell asleep, the hamster's dead corpse bloodying his face into a wicked smirk.


	9. 9 (Regular)

Everything was dark, candid, his eyes unable to trace through the bright white of the hospital room. Amy sat beside him, worrying, carrying the baby they had in her arms, sleeping dutifully, and Miles kept checking his phone for text messages from his friends. Nothing. He remembered he had no friends.

I lied completely still; stiff, as the nurses and doctors came by, examining us. The screen window was so black, that I could sniff an incoming storm blazing in the skies, with its fiery thunderbolts and the Apocalyptic Horsemen ready to spread famine and the plague and all that. I was warned about them many years ago, when the ravens sat and observed my body, burning incense in their noses not to get my disease, my very fatal disease that would kill them all and everyone else on this Godforsaken planet.

(Depression, I whispered.)

The nurse looked at me, while she wrapped my wounds and probably gave me a kiss too, knowing that I was strictly a lesbian and she looked nice underneath all that face powder. She seemed to ignore my attempts at crowning her like a male peacock however, and she left, complaining that we already had a wife who worried about us and we were being deceitful and untrustworthy. She tried to explain. Multiple personalities. Dissociative Identity. But they didn't believe her. They said ever since Sybil was found to be a fraud, DID was no longer a valid diagnosis, and even if it was, very few people had it, and what kind of life did Sonic led to be traumatized to be split to 125 parts?

She truly didn't understand, and I felt bad for her, the little bitch.

She heard my words, fallen from my lips like thorns. She asked me what was my problem and I said there was nothing wrong except for her denying us any validation that we were traumatized and sick and we needed help. She said there was nothing she could do but to take us to some shitty mental hospital a few blocks away. And we said no.

"Your choice, you wacko."

She didn't notice the feminine voice, the breasts that suddenly sprouted from him. I didn't want her around anymore. Catatonia set in. And I lied completely still; stiff, waiting for the doctor to come in and mislabel us with schizophrenia or something again.

Amy saw that I was sweating in the barely air-conditioned hospital and gave me a cold cup of water and a wet towel to put on my head. I was much obliged, and I told her that Sonic wasn't always this way. He was sane before we figured out that his mother would do this to exact revenge on us.

"Exact revenge? What do you mean? She just gave you this beach house and a lot of money and you think she's trying to get revenge on you guys?"

It was possible, I said.

She knew about us. She always knew about us. How Sonic seemed to change opinions and thoughts on subjects, how he changed his voice drastically, how his eyes seemed to even change color (Mine was silver, silver eyes, and Amy could catch that he had silver eyes too). I told her she knew, and this was her plan to separate all of us, so she could destroy all of us. Because we often fought. We argued. The apartment was never big enough for people like us, especially for personalities like Rosa and Francoise and Elvie. Women with big personalities. And we had to hear Mary Contrary tell us from the thin walls that we were going to burn in Hell. And Renee telling us to settle down cause she was trying to read. And the children and the infants crying. And Incisor chopping up several things into individual parts, even books.

We had to watch out for Shadow, his anger never quenched, and Silver who claimed he could tell the future for all of us, and the Beast who watches out for the Core, the center of the system that Sonic had, and as I explained to her of more personalities, like Catatonia and Kathy and the Godforsaken Razor and Mary Quite, the sister of Mary Contrary, and there were so many in that apartment, keeping their own little things and Guardian making sure everyone was safe and the System was still on and Sonic was still a viable program for us to use...

The doctor scratched his beard, and inspected us closely. He saw the wound, and she told him on what happened, that another personality had come and hurt Sonic.

He nodded his head. He said Sonic was an interesting case. Nodding his head like a bobblehead, he kept inspecting our other wounds, like the cuts that Elvie made on his feet, the small little incisions Incisor tried to make when thinking of chopping Sonic in half, and we were a mess, a bloody mess, and I even told the doctor that I was very sad that he had to see us this way.

I rubbed my foot, full of nasty little scars! Elvie was a cutter, and we kept telling her she couldn't do that to dear old Sonic, but she wouldn't listen!

I looked at the mangy wallpaper of the hospital, the heat blowing through the windows of the storm arising in the horizon, and I used the wet washcloth as a fan, blowing wind to myself. Dr. Brunson at last wasn't sure what to think when Amy had told him that the hospital wouldn't help him at all. Especially when we knew the Beast was coming to scar us all up and make us rot in the summer sun and hold us high-nigh contemptible to what happened when Momma Sonic raped us! Bless him!

"What's your name?" he asked. The old varmint asked what my name was, and I told him it was Kathy. With a K. Capital.

He looked at Sonic's body, seeing the two lumps on his chest, along with the change in eye color (mine were blue) and he thought he hadn't seen anything like this before, nope, nothing like this before, and he was sure that Sonic had split personalities, but nothing at all to this extent.

"And he's hurting himself?" he asked, the dumbass wondering if that was the truth. Of course it was. I was hurting him. I was making him realize our sins. The sins we committed to make the mother hate us.

I once loved his mother. I really did. I trusted her. I gave her my secrets and my kindness for her to love me. She did love me. She loved me too much.

She told me to never tell anyone of our secret. The fingers to her vagina. I grew sick, my stomach twisted like a medical snake, and I didn't want her to hurt me anymore, so I once brought a knife, waiting for mommy dearest to come home, held nigh to the air, holding her contemptible for the things she done to me...

(Bless the last part of her good body she had left while she was still alive.)

Sonic wasn't sure if he even had a mother before it was announced that her fortunes went to him. He just came out of nowhere, like us. He was just birthed by God and put on this planet to be a walking basketcase for everyone to glamorize over. The fucking media. How they gazed at us with their priggish eyes, their slackjawed mouths full of saliva, I hated all of them, speaking over the microphone, and I told them to keep me a secret. Away from the pigs. Away from the idolaters of decay.

He wasn't sure what to think. Amy said he would keep a close eye on him. She said she would take care of the baby and make sure Sonic took his medication. Dr. Brunson I could feel was groping his pockets for a pipe, and I felt sorry for the man, having to deal with us.

He said he should at least attend therapeutic sessions with a doctor that had some knowledge on dissociative disorders. We were afraid, as many doctors are known to take this illness and just claim we were doing it for attention. Some were still skeptical, and the doctor back at the loony bin thought we just had some sort of dissociative fugue from stress. But stress was everywhere in our lives, and we experienced it constantly everyday. The sleepless nights. The constant scratches on the program's feet and arms. Seeing how much time had gone by when we looked at the clock. Passing out one minute at a time, with the new facets of us, the diamond glittering so brilliantly in the sun as Amy had to take us away from the overheated, overcrowded hospital where there were screaming in-anguish pregnant mothers, and teenagers who attempted suicide by only swallowing some aspirin. Trust me, we tried that already. And we didn't want to eat that shitty tar again.

We acted as if we were expecting, despite Sonic being a male hedgehog. She rolled us on a wheelchair and we looked at the sun roasting the earthworms on the road. They were dry and crinkled like French fries and Emet thought they looked delicious and she grabbed one and bit its head off and threw the rest of it away, chewing on it delicately.

The worm, like us, grew two dried up heads, and died in the sunlight.

Catatonia thought of suicide. Her bones were weak, her body was pale, her skin was rotting and festering with the plague. I lied completely still; stiff, while rubbing my eyes constantly, pulling the flaps of my lids down and wanting this pain to go away. This wretched pain. Did we want to hurt ourselves again? Did we want to be admitted in some psychiatric ward and be misunderstood by doctors only being paid to listen to rich celebrities talk about how traumatized they were from the media?

"It sounds like you're very depressed," the therapist said.

I tapped my fingers in syncopation. I expected him to just prescribe us with some Prozac and Zoloft and be done with the session and bring up another patient who simply thought she wasn't rich enough.

God, I hated it here. How it smelled like rich chamomile (my least favorite tea), how the doctor played soothing tapes and gave me crayons to play with even though I knew I didn't want to make some shitty artwork. I've never felt this depressed right now. I've never felt so disgusted with all of these events, and this therapist thought I was the main personality. Me. Not Sonic, who once was happy before we took over his life with this meaningless bullshit.

Who cared if we were violently and repeatedly raped by both our mother and father?

Who cared if we caused our father to become a five-year-old and we had to take care of him because mother wouldn't?

Who cared if our mother brainwashed us into believing we were bad and that we deserved to only serve her and nothing else because we had no other purpose in life?

What job did Sonic had anyway? I asked him.

"From what I can tell, he worked at a bottling factory."

A slave to the corporations. Great.

I was sick. I imagined the ravens covering me up on my coffin, and I would be burned away without my family knowing because I had the plague.

"Why do you believe you have the plague?" he asked.

Because depression was an incurable disease, and it was infectious as herpes.

Get someone who's unhappy over a party and complain that the appetizers taste like tampons and the punch tastes like period blood and all the men ever wanted to focus on were the women's vaginas, then everyone else was unhappy. You see.

Like how smiles were contagious. So is unhappiness. So is sorrow.

He asked me if I was going to do anything to harm myself. I said no. I smiled sweetly, full of sugary syrup coming from my teeth. I told him I felt okay. I told him I felt I could conquer the world.

"You weren't like that when you came in..."

Of course not. To be honest with you, I was thinking of taking Sonic's medication and wiping myself out, but if you're willing to talk me through about it, I won't do it.

He settled in his seat uncomfortably, writing more in his pen. It was red, red as a rose. Red as the roses I smelled they were burning in my home.

Sonic hasn't been awake for several days. We took over his life, and I'm sure he would be in for a rude awakening once he woke up.

"Your name is Catatonia, right?"

I shifted too in my seat, prepared to tell him my life story. About how I experienced sorrow throughout the ages. Especially the ages in which the Black Death came.

I wasn't sure if I could tell him all of this under the hour that was covered by Sonic's insurance. But he told me we would get to it in time.

He saw that we were writing a book of our experiences, to one day give to Sonic so he could understand what it was like inside his head. He thought it was interesting, and asked to see it. And we gave him everything up to chapter 8, the memory that we couldn't stand to even think about where his father in a drunken rage wrung his hamster like a washcloth and Sonic had thoughts of murdering his father, killing him the same way he killed Gideon.

Did we have many ill thoughts towards his father? Yes, very much so.

The bastard was lazy and never helped the mother figure with the dishes, the housework, anything that required effort. He worked at an office for eight hours and then went home to bars, drinking till he was plastered.

He sexually abused us for a long time, and then when the accident happened, the accident where Sonic snapped and beat his head with a metal baseball bat, he received some head trauma and basically was turned into a child. Sonic wasn't charged with anything, and his mother covered it up with him falling down the stairs cause of his drunkenness. She thought Sonic taking care of him for the rest of his life was punishment enough.

The sexual abuse stopped, but he called us vicious names and threw beer bottles at us in a fit. Sonic still had thoughts of murdering him, this time succeeding in his attempts. When his mother got this from him, she laughed in a very posh way and said "Go ahead". But he never did.

And the thing that was so horrible, the thing that hurt us deeply, it involved the Beast, it involved Shadow and Silver, the needle, the need-...

Time's up, he said.

"It's time for you to go home and think about this session." He smiled, awkwardly.

He seemed like a callous therapist, not at all caring about our story or what we experienced. I grew sick, the snakes in my stomach twisting and twisting till Emet came out again and played with her vomit in his room.

He woke up. Finally.

"So how was the session?" she asked.

"Huh? What?"

"How was the session?" she asked, slowly.

"What session? What are you talkin' about, Ames?"

Sonic was back, she thought. But oh God, the things she had to tell him that was happening. Oh God, oh God.

She hugged him, her arms looping around his neck, and he smiled, never seeing Amy being this happy to see him in so long. She was always concerned. Always wondering what happened to her dear old Sonic who was happy and so carefree.

The storm seemed to fade away in the distance. The sun appeared, golden, hot, tawny and jagged.

"I missed you Sonic," she said.

"Gee, I do too Amy, but what..."

She kissed him on the lips, softly, passionately, and her heart clamored in his chest, for that hedgehog to be entirely hers, and not the personalities (I could tell) and she wanted him and she hungered for him and she couldn't let go of him and Sonic was beginning to grow concerned, her face emitting tears and worry. She wanted him to stay. Stay there with her. She still never wanted him to disappear again, and she sobbed, as if she became a shattered soul herself, telling him everything that happened.

She fell on the floor, a red rose being dessicated so finely on the marble floor. Bless her!


	10. 10 (Vignette)

It was one of the first vacations we experienced, Mr. Therapist. We were going to the mother's beach house. She reserved it especially for her little young'un, her little Sonic, and she stowed away his father's credit cards and money and beer for him to behave on this trip. We thought good of the mother that she made an effort to protect him. He smiled, she smiled. We were off in the van, and she played lovely tunes on the radio, singing along to them with her melodic, operatic voice, and Sonic thought happy days were coming along on this shore, that finally, there would be calm waves, gentle risings, and he was happy. For once, happy.

Granted, Mr. Therapist, he didn't know about the rape. We kept that as a secret from him. He thought of nothing but good things of his mother. His father, well, not so much. He actually asked her if they could leave him on the trip. And she said no. Everyone had to participate. Even Gideon, if he was still alive.

Sonic still buried him in the rose bushes of his mother's garden, his body feeding the soil.

Many hours and eating out later (with the mother playfully feeding Sonic as if he was an infant and tickling him and all kinds of other infantile things that make me grow vile as I remember it now, while the father just ate his meal quietly, with a cup of black coffee as bitter as his future), they were finally at the beach, and Sonic played with the grains of sand, made his sand castles, let the shore tickle his feet and kiss him gently and he even watched the sunset with his mother, holding hands, Sonic unsure of exactly what happened between him and his mother the other night. He caught a recollection of it, him licking some sort of cave, but we tried to uphold the memory. Sonic didn't need to remember. We only let him remember the happy memories he had with his mother.

His father collected pennies and nickels in his pockets, calling the work people, the drones in the office, telling them that he was away. Picking up another small bottle of liquor while the children played their little games. He drank the whiskey warm from the store, the liquid amiable in his throat, feeling as if his organs were no longer solidified.

I speak matter-of-factly, of course, about Sonic's vacation, Mr. Therapist. I saw that the mother, despite her egregious manner with her only child, her little porcelain Christ of a doll on her dresser (Sonic would look at it, finger it, and wonder why she kept such an atrocious (and yet such a pretty, ghastly thing) thing in her home. The little girl looked so fragile, pale, as if she was hooked to an IV and she was ready to die any minute now. Sonic looked around in her dresser, seeing more things that caught his eye with a curious interest, such as her brand of Lucky Strike cigarettes and her dainty hookah she uses to smoke her marijuana with, along with a vibrator that Sonic didn't at all knew what its purpose was for, and as it shuddered violently against the dresser door we grew scared and shut it in a hurry, worried that the mistress would come here any minute and punish us.), would place the son's hand on her body, while she grinned harshly against the iodine light. And her white teeth like a broken shard in the hotel bedroom, smiling wickedly as she placed Sonic's hand on her chest, Sonic having no recollection of the event at all but me. She rubbed it, and I was scared. Sweat burst forth from my pores, and I wanted her to stop. This wasn't, truly it wasn't, in my calculations of the day, and I kept telling her to stop, but she got nearer to her porcelain little Christ, her little worshiped idol of her son, and she asked him that there was a snake underneath her and he wanted her to get it.

These games were disgusting, made me grow ill with unease and anxiety. She glided his hand toward her crotch, and I told her no, I didn't want to be there! Mommy can't treat me that way! Mommy can't make me touch the yucky part, where the snake has been! I cried, but she burned me with the Luckies. She told me to keep digging, I would find treasure and maybe some Reese Cups she got from the vending machine.

Father wasn't there. He drank. He could've watched his son get tortured and not give a damn. The flesh inside her smelled like a rotten, pissed-on carpet in a dilapidated house, and I wondered what the damn bitch ate that caused her to smell so bad. The smell overflowed in my nostrils, and I felt like throwing up. We all did. I just wanted to throw up in her damn crotch and see how she liked it, having disgusting things inside her. Her own son. An incestuous relationship. It all was disgusting, and I hated myself for even following her rules of the game, rubbing the clitoris, and I wanted to kill myself when she orgasmed. Sonic was a lucky bastard. He had no memory of this event, but instead, it would show up as a dream, and he would think, "Huh? Isn't that funny? I was having sex with my mother, but I never did! Mom would never do that!"

I felt I hated him for how lucky he was, to not acknowledge all the pain we felt. To see the blood and the misery on our sticky little fingers and have him not know of who we were. They told me I had to hide from him, to not reveal our hidden purpose, that we were secretly his guardians, the ones who would protect him from people like this ever coming into his life again.

She fell asleep. She was satisfied with her meal, her serpentine-like body rolling across the bedsheets, rattling and hissing through her fanged teeth. They looked like the moon. We saw that same damn white moth that followed us here to our vacation in California. I smacked my hands together in the air, crushing its insignificant, pathetic life. The moth that might as well have been an hallucination, a fleeting fantasy, was dead.


	11. 11 (Regular)

"So I have multiple personalities like Sybil and Eve...is that what you're trying to tell me?"

She nodded, the tears thick and viscous in her eyes. She touched him, listened to his pulse steadily, just to know that he was still alive. That he was still here. Even if we all shared the same heart.

"You're sick. I told you that before and I'll tell you again. You're sick. You need help. What your mother did to you..."

"I had good memories with my mother, Ames," he said, pricking his finger inside his ear, showing disinterest in her beliefs. He felt there was something he wanted out of his mind, and it was us. And we loved him for it! Bless the little darling!

"Then why did she abuse you, Sonic? Why did she..."

She wasn't sure if she could say it, especially in front of the fleeing personality, babbling and playing with the little wooden blocks, trying to spell out a name. Suckling his thumb, he looked at Amy with greedy, expectant and timid eyes, wishing for more of her milk. She couldn't give him the milk in her breast as it was reserved for Sonic alone when they had sex, but she thought it over and believed it would be a long time before she could ever experience it again.

We watched the child clamber to his lap, like a kitten with only needlepoint claws, and his hands grasped at the bottle, his eyes drowsed and lulled by how warm he felt, in his footie pajamas and the bath she gave him, the bedtime story she would read about the boy's keychain of an alligator growing bigger and bigger until he couldn't fit him in his bathtub, and the child would be ready for sleep, kicking his small feet in the air and watching the many planets and galaxies dance around him, his fingers touching the golden sun and not at all getting burned or shot straight to the ocean like Icarus.

"She didn't abuse me, Amy. I swear to God she didn't abuse me. She treated me like a baby sometimes, but I kind of liked it, you know? Because my father just mostly got drunk at bars all the time and didn't really help us. He saw me going to school and didn't even give me five bucks to go to the gas station across the street to give me a soda and chips for crying out loud. He just worked at his firm and at the end of the day he got drunk. But I was sure he didn't lay a hand on me either."

Amy glared at him, expecting us to come out, any time we pleased. But no, we wanted Sonic to express himself. We wanted him to believe in his disbelief further until we cut the scene like Incisor did to the neighbor's dead cat.

This scene? About...400 cuts across the horizon. Maybe 200 vertically. Sonic spoke about one hundred and fourteen words, and Amy continued to speak about almost virtually none, her concern steaming from her like a locomotive. A locomotive goes about a hundred miles an hour, usually slower, due to the heavy goods it carries on its back. Sonic, while he was a fast thinker, carried so many heavy goods along with him, that he felt sick, and tired. Feeling sick and tired meant you didn't want to go on anymore. The emotion runs deeply. As deeply as I can cut Sonic with my scalpel.

He sighed. He was like a lotus flower on the emerging sun, the acquiesced moon. He dove into the refrigerator and got another beer. He wasn't an alcoholic like his father, but he drank every day, at least one or two beers, and it did concern me, however, that he would soon find the drinks his vice like his father had done in the past.

We went inside his thoughts, the program that was completely unaware of us, thinking if we really existed. He only had, in his memory component, bad memories of his father, of him slapping him and punching him if he didn't play those damn sports so well, and his constant lurching towards the bar like a leper wanting a cure from Jesus. He remembered the odd, misshapen doll on his mother's dresser, wondering why it had its arms stretched, its head sunken and low, its eyes barely reaching his. When we gazed at it, we thought of it as a metaphor, that we were the mother's little plaything to torture, like society had once done with Christ, but Sonic just thought, of how odd, what a pretty thing on Mommy's dresser that stretched out her body before him, her nuptial breasts exposed, between her legs stabbed and protruded with sewing needles. What a pretty thing that was being tortured, Sonic said. What a pretty thing that was lying against the mirror, staring at itself, wondering what that other hedgehog in the mirror was doing, controlling her life, hurting her in ways she couldn't ever say to anyone to her lips being made of pure china, what a pretty little thing to be scarred by God's sleight of hand.

I was scared. I was scared of the inevitability that Sonic would find us out. Programs couldn't be self-conscious. But they seemed to be these days. Computers who realized someone was controlling them. Cars with emotions to tell the driver of their condition. Soon sentient robots would come, I was sure of it. The Beast would come out again, rupture from Sonic's brain, and raise chaos again like he did last time. His toothy grin gazing out at us, his sheep among the flock that he could eat and swallow and devour any time he wished, his claws slaying the ones who wanted to hurt Sonic further, and the Core. We can't hurt the Core either. The Core controlled everything. The Core was only a brilliant, but naive infant who would spoil and rot away at the touch of his mother's nostalgic finger.

We would love to help him, we told the Beast. But we couldn't reveal ourselves. Like you had in the past. You were shown to Sonic, and you did the best you could to hide those memories, and Amy learned of some inkling of his past you kept in that damn book we burned, and...

WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU BURNED THE BOOK?

We didn't really burn it, but...it's hidden away. Sonic can't know about us. The abuse from his mother has to be kept in the deep recesses of his mind. His sinews. If he learned everything about us, knew the Godawful truth about his mother, he would be broken. And more of us will have to come and help him. You can't show up again. We...

BUT YOU BURNED THE BOOK. YOU SAID YOU BURNED THE BOOK. I CANNOT FORGIVE YOU FOR BURNING THE BOOK.

I didn't. It's...

YOU'RE LYING. I CAN SMELL LIES IN PEOPLE'S BREATH.

(It was true. The Beast can tell if you're lying by just the smell of the pheromones you discrete when you lie, and he could tell I lied about keeping the book safe. The drawings that Tim the Timid had done about the Beast. The pictures of Sonic's broken down, rat-infested house, along with the holes his father punched in from his drunken rages. The drawing of the needle, seeping out black blood in Sonic's crevice of a scar on his hand that he now unconsciously hides with his gloves, gone.)

I WILL COME OUT. I WILL AVENGE FOR WHAT HAPPENED TO SONIC. I WILL MAKE SONIC PURE AND WHOLE AGAIN. HE IS DIRTY, UNCLEAN. I WILL SANCTIFY HIM. I WILL MAKE HIM UNMARKED BY HIS MOTHER. HER STAINS WILL NOT DIRTY HIS SOUL. I WILL TAKE A THOUSAND CAKES OF SOAP TO WASH OFF THE FILTH IN SONIC'S BODY. THE PROGRAM NEEDS TO BE CLEANED. IT NEEDS A DISK DEFRAGMENTATION. HIS MEMORIES WILL GO TO THE RECYCLE BIN. I WILL MAKE SURE SONIC IS NOBLE AND NOT AT ALL LIKE ME, A MONSTER.

(We can only hope so, Beast. We can only hope so. I wasn't sure how I could help him any further.)

Amy tucked the child into his crib, babbling and bubbling his words, bouncing rhythmically to the sounds of her lullabies, and soon, the child stopped moving excitedly, clutched the blankets tightly in his small, wrung fists, and he went to sleep, with a small smile on his face.

Sonic thought of asking Amy to do the same to him, as he once he remembered his loving times with his mother, he never could think of one instance where she gave him a goodnight kiss and a lullaby. They all seemed muddled and black, as if they didn't exist.

Sonic slept beside Amy, and he felt conscious in the dark. He could smell the scent of her breasts, the vagina that was nestled away. No sexual desire had come of him. It was vile. Rotten. He no longer wanted to have sex. To see the act of two people coming together and trading fluids disgusted him, his hands shaking, and my beads clacking as he rose from the bed and watched the ocean rise and fall under the incandescent moon, a little lamp of God's watching over him.

(Continuing to hear the rush of the seminal fluids inside him. Disgust spread over him, the wide wings of the moth smacked and crushed underneath his hands. The disgust moth. It was the same color as semen, and Sonic had grown to hate the color of white. It meant pureness. But to him, it meant so much more. It meant life. But to Sonic, it was the end of life. I remember when his father had came over and told him to suck on that wretched snake, and he clasped the wretched thing inside of him, his teeth drawing closer to his penis, biting the body part that was trying to feed him, give him the life that he would cough up and gag and vomit. Oh God oh God oh God don't let the whiteness get on me don't get it on me don't let it vilify me don't let it end my life I cannot even think to end my relationship with God and I wanted Sonic to be saved from his sins and into the kingdom above, but I couldn't save Sonic he was too far gone I could see that he enjoyed the sexual acts between his family and why because he had to act like he enjoyed it otherwise his father would come and put the sewing needle inside of him he lied and said it was full of HIV which at the time had scared poor little Sonic but I'm sure his penis was full of it too oh God.)

He desired her. He could hear her moaning underneath the blankets. He hated the sound. He wasn't sure why. The beach continued to moan underneath the starless night. Sonic wanted to see all the stars in the sky but they weren't there. And I thought, not only were we like God, with his multiple personalities (God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost) but we were sure that the entire universe was nothing but one single entity, with a multiple personality disorder too. Look at the stars! There were so many planets! So many galaxies! Bless the galaxies! And there were many suns, many supernovas, and all the personalities were vastly different, many of them utterly unlike in their design, and this trauma, this God, or as we could say in Sonic's case, his mother, made these many systems inside of us all. They all had different functions; they all saw this program of ours differently. The system had allowed Sonic to live throughout his life as a normal hedgehog. Like the planets had used their functions, and allowed this entire galaxy to live. God had used his functions, with Jesus dying for us. But how many times could I talk about Jesus to you, Mr. Therapist? Goodness me, I was sure I discussed him so many times that you would be ridiculously dense if you couldn't tell I was a devout Christian.

Sonic went downstairs. He looked in the fridge and got out another beer. Tired. But he couldn't sleep. I kept having him be disgusted by our bodily functions.

Then, he felt an urge to pee. But his body once more disgusted him. He looked at himself in the mirror, his frail, skinny, tuckered-out body, with his ribs poking through his chest, ready to stab through his skin, his eyes that became the color of mildew, the mushrooms that were growing in the irises, so proud, so tall, so brown...

Had I gone mad, Mr. Therapist? How can you describe someone's irises as mushrooms? It's hard to explain. When I saw that Sonic's eyes were violet, it was so...unexpected, like when you see some brown mushrooms growing out of your shower walls. And yes, you could get them to go away, but no, you're mesmerized by them, how this act of nature could happen to your bathroom. You think, maybe I should grow some grass in this bathroom too, allow the spiders to roam, make everything like dirt, and make the shower into a rain cloud, making it drench the earth, use eco-friendly products, allow these mushrooms to grow into a fairy ring. You got an ecosystem in your bathroom. And well, I thought that way with Sonic.

See, the thing is that...

Sonic started off as one personality, at first. The lone growing little sproutling mushroom. His mother was carrying him, feeding him, taking care of him, like a good mother is wont to do. Father was away somewhere. Probably getting drunk, getting his pee-colored cure. The mother figure saw this mushroom of Sonic and thought, well, how strange that this thing had showed up in my life. But she's fascinated. The child interests her. Maybe more than it should for most mothers.

She gazes at the child's body, how much of it was her own. The eyes were hers. The color was her husband's. But look at his hands, how he wrung and reached for her! They were brown, like the mushrooms I told you about. His nose was splendid! His smile cut across her mind and she smiled too. He had Momma's face. So much of the child was hers. Like the mushroom was so much of your own dead skin and waste and moist conditions. A creature that was so healthy, so happy, such a quiet and attentive baby, such a thing that any mother should be proud of! She knew she would love Sonic. The mother's bond had stitched in her mind, had forged across in Sonic's mind. The nurses knew of the miracle of childbirth. Sonic was hers, and she was so happy that this was true. With their loud exclamations of "he's a happy, healthy baby boy!" she shrilled and cheered!

She wanted a boy. She didn't want a girl. Girls were too much like little fools. Boys were chosen by the government to be proud citizens, to protect us, make decisions for the future. Oh, little Sonic, he would make his mother proud!

She looked at his body further. Scrutinizing it. Something was wrong with the child. The nurses had lied to her. The child wasn't completely perfect, whole. Maybe she could see through his willowed eyes and see there was some sort of Core there, that could tell something terrible was going to happen to our program. The Core controlled everything, yet didn't, if that makes sense to you, Mr. Therapist. It could predict that his mother was a very jealous woman, a very lonely woman who just wanted the company of a boy to satisfy her. Her husband was very rarely in her life. Something was odd in his face. He saw things differently. In this case, his mother looked not at all like a loving figure. Her teeth and hair and face were disheveled. She wasn't elegant, like God had promised him she would be. She drank nothing but coffee and some small snacks of cheese in all those weeks. Her eyes, the butterfly kisses she granted him with, were gnarled, like barbed wire, and they made small indents on his fragile skin, on his porcelain eyes.

The child was wrong, she told herself.

The nurses, they lied.

His crying was an octave higher than the other babies in the incubation room. When she saw him, colors became blacker. Her body shattered pieces by pieces whenever she kissed the boy. Something was wrong in her womb, her black cataclysmic womb that produced a child that was inherently wrong and flawed. The nurses had told her that Sonic was healthy, that he had no signs of early autism or any other developmental disorder. Yet, something was wrong. She wrung her hands in the folds of her napkins. Ripped them into little pieces that looked like small little men, reaching towards her breasts. She chewed on her gum passively, as the nurses had got her to sign the birth certificates and indenting his long feet. The child was sick, somehow, with some hidden neurological disorder. He would die at the age of 5. He would die like her husband had died away in the bars.

I felt bad for her, but that ended soon. Soon I had to hate her because she committed a great sin to God. And that, Mr. Therapist, you will find out in time. It was the first time that Sonic had ever been abused. And I pray to God for us to forget that memory. But it's there. Imprinted. A burn that will never fade away in our hearts. Not all the skin grafts in the world could make us forget the damage it caused.

The room made her shiver. She could hear the groanings of the other mothers pasteurizing their babies from their bellies. How pink and blue they were when they came out. Sonic was a little pink at first, but then, he had the shiny coat of his father. Maybe it was because Sonic was soon just like his father in the later years. Maybe she could sense that. Her fingers made long white shallow marks on the cage that imprisoned the babies from their mothers. She told the nurses something was wrong. They lied. They lied. They so lied to her Godforsaken face. Sonic wasn't supposed to look so much like his father.

Except for his jade eyes, they were much alike. She could tell he would soon have the same attitude as his father in his early years, when they met in high school. Back when Sonic's father was a respectable man, soon going to college to being an accountant. He wanted to work for the IRS. That dream soon faded away in his grasp, and he became a worker drone addicted to the drink (How many times can I remind you of that, Mr. Therapist? That his father was a bastard drunk? I believe drinking alcohol even once is a sin that can send you straight to Hell, so I don't touch the drink. People claim I'm slightly Buddhist. Maybe. Maybe I am, but the drink leads people to sin and regret, and I wished it never existed at all.)

Her violet eyes stared through him, being silent as the nurses babied him, their favorite little affable infant in the ward. At the time, we were dormant, but the Core was trying to tell us that the mother was a beast, and would break down her son in whichever way possible. And it was only because he had so much of his father in him. So much of her, too. The mother often looked in the mirror and couldn't tell it was her, peeking into her violet eyes, her fingers bloody and sore from psoriasis. The long droll of the hospital made her smoke a cigarette on the end of her hookah, even if smoking wasn't allowed in the hospital wards, especially ones with so many vulnerable babies.

She wanted to kill them all, was what she thought. Choke them with her little gray wisped hands. She laughed softly as the child didn't even glanced at her and realized that he belonged to her, her own little property, her own little creation from her vagina, and God yes, she laughed and tried to smash the window, but the nurses had apprehended her and gave her a small dose of Xanax. Her heart beat slowly, the blood was less intense and cold and not as black and viscous, but her erratic behavior made her weep, her long shaky fingernails stroking the pale skin of her face, and the nurses thought she was suffering from Postpartum Depression. There was something faulty in her, a miswiring, that wanted her to kill Sonic, despite being the child that any mother could ever hope to receive from the heavenly loins of God.

We saw her leave in her long mink fur coat trailing behind her, her face bleeding from possible self-harm, the hookah bobbing in her mouth as the smoke trailed away to the baby's small little oxygenated branches of life. Sonic was only a few hours old, but he knew. He knew that his mother was sick. There was something as wrong with her as she thought there was something wrong with him. Of course, infants didn't have much more thought than that, other than the love of a mother and the wanting of milk and to be changed, but the nurses weren't sure if he could ever be with his mother. His babbling mouth longed for her, his thumb wishing it were her breasts, and well, the nurses ultimately decided to give him to her. They weren't sure what to do. Once his mother disappeared, once he could sense that she could never come back, he began to cry and shriek and wail until his face was red. The nurses loved Sonic, and felt saddened there wasn't much they could do for a baby who seemed so gifted with the power of perception and kindness and love.

If only his mother didn't let that kindness rot away. Sonic still tries his best, but the program was incapable of being as perceptive as he used to be, and while he tried to love his son and smother him and shower him with affection and compliments, there wasn't much feeling. We could tell he was lost. The first memory he could remember as a child was his mother running away from the hospital, her mink fur coat tattered and musty and her cigarette nearly falling from her lips that were pale and nearly blue with the winter's chill.

Maybe his mother was human, after all. Postpartum depression was something that many women could not joke about. Despite his mother's claim to be elegant and worldly, she was as sick as we were. She was a nurse too; she could've known the reactions of mothers falling to psychotic depression once they gave birth to a child. She wanted to become a movie star, be shown on TV like a glass shimmering ornament when she got ready to dress the tree and posit the tinsel on everything she claimed she wanted to shine and glamorize, and she soon left the world of nursing shortly after Sonic was born. It was mostly just him and her in the house. The baby and her. The father often drank and slunk away from them. Then he went to work, where his boss was willing to give pieces of shit like him a second chance.

The room was mostly silent. Sonic was still quite a torpid baby, and he often liked to look at his mother's face, expecting her to smile, for her lips to be curved like wilted roses. The magazine that was hooked to her hand tried to give parenting tips to her, but she wasn't willing to listen. This baby she wasn't sure if it was hers.

She fetched a glass of wine while the infant still looked at her, pawing and bubbling over his blocks and plastic colorful keys. The night was gray, such an awful, ghastly sight for the mother to come to giving birth to her child on Christmas Eve. She looked out the window and she wondered when all this snow would stop being so fucking dirty and impure. She listened to the small tatterings of footsteps from the rats above the attic. They were the only thing that got her to sleep these nights.

Soon, the mother had arrived with her little bundle of joy, her little soldier in the mink cloth, her lips chewing in the efficacious light of the cities. California was such a prosperous state she said to herself, clutching the child close to her belly. It was a place where she could be herself. Going to her friends' homes and asking if she could have a cup of sugar, a little glass of grape Kool-Aid half watered down with some vodka, she would laugh and show her pretty little things she had to show to her friends, and then the friends would engage in activities that I thought were sinful and homosexual. Her husband never knew of her escapades, of her trips to her friend whom she called "Watermelon Sugar", where she drank many glasses of watermelon Kool-Aid a day and had a small little girl she called Honeydew, who had short neck-length wispy blond hair, mistaking her for a boy. Watermelon saw her child Sonic and thought how adorable the baby was, how delicious as if she was a witch in a Hansel and Gretel tale with her walls so coated with chocolate and candy, with the oven hot enough to melt Jews into ashes. Watermelon even held Sonic in her arms, kissed him softly, and he whispered babblings, as if Watermelon wasn't at all a bad mother.

The entire cupboards were decorated with fruit; holes cut in the shapes of hearts, and dried out old flaky wallpaper. Just like the mother's psoriasis.

"Post-partum depression?" she asked, with a long drag and a flick of a cigarette, the blue smoke making entrails in the wallpaper, yellowing at the wispy touches of their demonic hands. "You don't have that, darlin'. You love Sonic, don't ya? I'm sure ya do."

Watermelon spoke with a Southern drawl, coming from a poor part of Texas. She was only in California due to her husband in jail, murdering another woman. Ask her if he raped her too, and she denied it. She got this small, inexpensive and drudging house, just to escape from the scorn of the Biblical Texans who said she would burn in Hell.

Am I rambling, Mr. Therapist? I promised I wouldn't do that.

(It's okay, Mary.)

It really is?

(Yes. Tell me everything. This is very important, for both you and me.)

Clack-clack. I clacked my prayer beads together. The therapist wanted me to continue on with the terrible things that happened to Sonic, but reader who is trying to be sympathetic to our tortured past and our worries, I'm not sure if I can go through with it. You see, Watermelon Sugar was a child abuser as well. And she often gave the ideas on what to do with Sonic later on in his life. Spanking simply wasn't enough. She was suggested to punish him with things that looked small to people at the time, to outwardly dangerous things. Like leaving him in the hot car in the summer whenever she shopped for liquor or at the grocery stores, telling him that he couldn't come with her because he would just make her buy candy and other childish trifles. And soon she used belts, whipping him as if he was a slave, and even had once choked him like a leashed dog. He was hurt, and he was hurt because Watermelon Sugar had turned the mother's inward rage outward, the fact that she never wanted Sonic to live at all, because he was something that was so happy, so put together, so smart, so friendly and kind, that she wanted to destroy him. Because he was like his father. Too much like her husband who she regretted meeting, who she regretted birthing. The husband often just sat in his Laz-E-Boy chair and just watched primetime television shows in the later years of Sonic's life, when Watermelon Sugar soon disappeared and was put in jail for drug trafficking. The mother figure was very sexually active, even more so when she was gone. Watermelon was the only thing that kept her together during the years with her husband where they often argued, where the father figure would abuse her. Putting things inside his food, even rat poison, even pissing in his white wine, it all seemed to be such small pithy things for them to get back at each other, as if they were grade school children.

Watermelon laughed as she told her each tip to get their children to behave, her teeth with calciferous black holes, her tongue yellowed with each nicotine gum she stole from her husband's old collection when she couldn't afford cigarettes.

The blond child was on the staircase, listening to their conversations. Her lips were pink like cherries, and she counted how many bruises were on her from her mother. Four.

"And then you round the lil' fucker up and put his hand on the stove. Put his whole damn body on the stove. A child plumped to perfection, ready to no longer be punished by ya. I never did it with my own child, but maybe I should."

"Maybe I 'hould," the little girl whispered in her nearly toothless lips.

"Why do you treat Honey that way, Sugar? Why do you feel like you have to hurt her so much?"

This was back when Sonic's mother was rational. She tried to ask why she hurt her child so much, and wondered if she would end up like a hillbilly like herself, that she often lied in bed with knowing full well it was a sin.

"Cuz that's how my pa raised me. And I think he raised me mighty well. I married a good husband for a while, until he went and off someone for not paying him enough of somethin', and Honey always misbehaves and acts too guddamn much like her pa. She gunna murder someone one day too, and I'se going to try to put a stop to that. Yes, put a stop to that. Did you know my ma was a fish, and my pa was a piece of fruit and that's why you call me Watermelon Sugar, Sweet?"

So primitive. So naive. So ridiculous and delusional in her beliefs. Yet she came over for sex, and they would lie every time Sonic's father figure drank till he had his fill in the bars, and returned home, with no question on who would take care of the baby.

The child played in the playground at Summit Park, watching the time die away as she kept glancing at her watch, not at all paying attention to the small hedgehog who was playing with the other children, walking on his own two feet quickly, and shrilly laughing and being gregarious with the other children. Mothers remarked on what such a happy child he was, that anyone who had him was such a lucky mother!

She wanted to break him down, bit by bit, piece by piece.

Her knuckles grew white in the dirty sun.

Cigarette bobbled slightly as she drank her coffee. She noticed she was growing some slight chin hair. Possibly from age, possibly from her hormones, and she didn't want anyone to find out. She never wanted to go to the doctor and get examined. The only one who could examine her was her son and Watermelon, but she was gone.

Look at him, she said. Look at him, clutching that basketball, barely being able to dribble it, the other mothers thinking he was cuter than their own children. A child that could be broken. Such a perfect, God-fearing child couldn't live happily under my grasp.

She told her son it was time to go. With an exclamation of "Awww, ma!" and some protests, she held his hand, tried to be gentle. There was some sanity left in her. She wanted to love him. But something was inside Sonic that she later grew to hate.

I'm...not sure of anything else, Mr. Therapist. We all have separate memories. It's why there are 125 of us. Because so many of them hold different memories. But I watched as his mother took him to the car, and she tried to be genteel again, being her amiable self, but Sonic, despite not being consciously aware of it, wanted to live in that playground forever, reach out to the mothers and tell them to love him, kiss him, shower him with affection until he could suffocate on their love and he didn't want anymore for the rest of his life. But the mother, the wretched serpent that clawed the steering wheel and told her son to be quiet, she soon did something that was horrible. A sin that I hear from the other personalities, that if we ever told Sonic, it would break him. I caught somewhat of a glance of it. When he was about 2 years old, she made him split. We became this byproduct of trauma. His mother created us. His father had also done wretched things to us that allowed our birth. But while we could be told that we could get over it, that his mother and father are dead, we wished they were still alive, so we could give them a taste of their own medicine. I don't believe in the eye-for-an-eye theory Mr. Therapist, but Emet had cooked something up that was supposed to be fed to their mother and father, just like they had for her. And well, his wife and his child wonder what that yellow box is, so acrid in its color, hiding the supposed meal that would lie to be fed to his parents, but...

(I'm afraid our time is up, Miss...)

Mary. Mary Quite. There's also my sister, Mary Contrary, and she's very sinful and deplorable, yet I feel like I must support and care for her in any way I can.

(But...from what you told me, did you say that you wanted to get revenge on his mother and father, that you stored this food item in the fridge where Amy and Miles could possibly get to and discover?)

We just tell him that it's food for lunch at work. And they believe us every time.

(Have you ever given this food to anyone before? Have you eaten it yourself?)

Oh God no. We would never give it to anyone but Miss Bitch herself, the fucking Queen of Everything, Stormie Thoroughbred, a name we never went with. Thoroughbred. Sounds so goddamn hoighty-toighty.

(Hello Miss Contrary.)

Hello yourself. Anyways, we planned on giving it to Stormie in her final years of life. She was about seventy-two years old or something. She had Alzheimer's. She barely remembered us.

Yet...I don't fucking know why we didn't feed her the disgusting food. She was infantile kind of like her husband. She was forgetting to speak somewhat, and could only eat soft foods. But Guardian came up, said Alzheimer's was a horrible enough punishment for her to suffer for what she did to us, and he could tell she was going to die in a few days anyways, and we weren't sure if we wanted the nurses who watched her to find out what happened to her and go to jail or a permanent institution for matricide.

(That was a good decision. I'm glad you decided to not go through with it. But why did you keep the meal when Stormie died?)

Because we planned on going back in time and giving it to her when she first abused Sonic.

(Excuse me?)

Yeah, this is weird to you now, but did you know that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a form of time travel?

(Yes. To the past. I can see what you mean.)

This system is very intricate, Mr. Therapist. As soon as Sonic imagines he's there with his mother again, we feed her. We feed her like she fed us those rat-poisoned chili dogs and expected us to eat our own vomit.

Mr. Therapist let us go back to our ordinary lives, no longer involved in time-travel, in sentimental little memories of the mother figure trying to take care of us.

We watched the steak become more bloody, more dead, more disgusting with each passing day. The maggots seemed to be enjoying it, groveling over it like newborn puppies to a nipple.


	12. 12 (Vignette)

**A/N: In case you couldn't tell, it seems like this story just gets worse and worse in its content. This is a really disgusting chapter and I hated writing it but I felt I needed to to show the harsh reality of how it is with DID. Sorry if the animal abuse chapters really make you uncomfortable, cause honestly, when I write them I don't have a single expression of emotion, and then when I read it, I feel like throwing up and crying. And I'm not trying to make this story "offensive" or anything either. **

**Trigger warnings for animal abuse and rape go into this chapter.**

The cat laid dead, giving no protests to Incisor's incisions. He examined the entire body, what made it catlike, nearly serpentine in its beauty, its feline royalty. He had to do everything the Incisor way and chop the cat into several different, individual parts. He made them so clean and precise that there was no blood or suffering exactly if this cat was alive. They were like a butcher chopping his pig meat for the other pigs to eat.

Was Incisor demented? Fucked up? No. Incisor just wanted to know how everything worked. He just wanted to know about every part of a specie, every organ and everything that let it be alive in its last few hours before it got run over by some taxi cab driver who didn't care at all to back up and see if the sentient creature was okay.

Incisor didn't know love, however. He very rarely expressed any emotions. Even when he experienced the onslaught of abuse from the mother and father figure, he didn't react, but instead wished he could cut them up to see what made them so angry. Incisor loved animals. Was fascinated about them. That he had to chop everything to its most concise part, its own set of gears and cogs that Incisor had called "The System". It is why we came up with the name of Sonic's personalities. We were simply known as The System. We were a program that some say is malfunctioning, but we actually allow Sonic to function. Just sometimes we go awry and decide that maybe Elvie and Madam Francoise wanted to have some fun. Incisor examined every single body part of the cat and soon decided that he had enough studying, and it was time to store the cat into individual jars where he could look back again later. What a little scientist, that Incisor making sure every bodily function of the cat worked in complete syncopation, bless him!

The father figure came over. I wished I could slice him into 24 parts. All evenly divided, as the human body is a symmetrical piece from God.

He grinned widely. I could tell he knew about the cat. Smokey. Smokey the cat who didn't live when the cab driver drove over him. Tires could crash an entire cat's body, and I felt sad about the loss of the cat, but knew that God had a purpose for everything, and maybe Smokey needed to go somewhere safe, because I heard the neighbors were semi-hoarders, forgetting to feed the cat and their home smelling of ammonia and urine. I'm sure their home was made of 96% of ammonia. It is an acrid taste on my tongue when I approach the yard. I can smell the stains on their shirts and jeans. They weren't like me. They were like the father figure.

He breathes a susurration into my ear.

"I'll tell them you experimented on the corpse of their cat unless you don't tell animal control that I raped the dog."

Their animals were often abused by us. And no, Mr. Therapist, it isn't funny. In fact, I am disgusted. And I felt betrayed that I couldn't experiment on animals anymore for science, and no, I apologize, I cannot tell you the scene between the father figure and the dog. I wished I could forget it. My self-hatred and fear could be divided into 2,089 parts. I felt sick. My stomach could be divided by three parts. Maybe four, if you count the bile I held and wanted to throw up.

I couldn't tell the control officers of what happened. The father figure had won. I knocked on their Asian door, the urine smell stinging my nostrils as they came over and smiled with coruscate teeth that nearly shimmered in the twilight. I told them that I saw Smokey ran away. He was gone. And I was very sure he wasn't coming back any time soon, as I held the cat's body and soul into a garbage bag, and threw it into the canister. They sobbed and said Smokey was their favorite cat. I knew. Smokey had the most beautiful set of eyes. Hazel. Rare for a cat. And those were the only parts I kept in my pretty jewels of organs from the beings I loved more than anything.


End file.
